Vibrant Meter: Periods, Pulsations, and Prosody in Blake’s Milton

Abstract

ABSTRACT Milton is known for its unorthodox treatment of time; however, scholarship tends to overlook one temporality of central importance: meter. This article argues that Milton’s metrical experiments are essential for understanding the poem’s strange temporal frameworks. Meter marks the intersection at which Milton’s primary concerns—poetry, physiology, and time—converge, a nodal point articulating poetry’s connection to living bodies, evolution, and history. Meter is patterned words, sound, and time, and Milton deploys it to map out a world that organizes itself according to interacting rhythmic patterns, casting meter as an ecological force that bridges interior and exterior life, as both meter and ecological processes are made legible through the interplay between expectation and deviation, repetition and variation, regularity and contingency. This article puts Blake in dialogue with anthropologist Gregory Bateson, an avid Blake reader whose Steps to an Ecology of Mind posits mind as a system of interdependent pathways that are irreducible to a bounded individual. Blake and Bateson’s affinity lies partly in their reputations as system thinkers but more so in their kinship as ecological thinkers who privilege pattern over substance as a framework for understanding our relationship with the external world.