Paradise Lost, work for the morning

John Milton published 1667 489 characters hard

To-morrow, ere fresh morning streak the east With first approach of light, we must be risen, And at our pleasant labour, to reform Yon flowery arbours, yonder alleys green, Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown, That mock our scant manuring, and require More hands than ours to lop their wanton growth: Those blossoms also, and those dropping gums, That lie bestrown, unsightly and unsmooth, Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease; Mean while, as Nature wills, night bids us rest.

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About this text

This speech comes from the fourth book of Paradise Lost, in which the garden is described in most detail. Milton used blank verse, unrhymed iambic lines, and defended that choice in a note added to the poem. He wrote much of the work after 1660, when he had lost his public position. The full text is on Project Gutenberg.

Where this text comes fromThis is Adam talking about getting up early to do the gardening, and Milton gives him eighty-three words of unrhymed verse to say it. The syntax follows Latin rather than English habit: the verb waits, subordinate clauses stack up in front of it, and the sense only closes at the very end. That construction is deliberate and it is the main reason people find the poem hard. Nothing in the vocabulary is difficult; the difficulty is entirely in the order things arrive.

What you might not noticeThe word tomorrow is set as To-morrow, with a hyphen and a capital, a form that stayed standard in English printing well into the nineteenth century. Source

What it trainsSixteen commas inside a single sentence of eighty-three words: the highest count in one sentence anywhere in this corpus, and there is no full stop until character 489. Each comma marks a clause boundary rather than a pause for breath, so losing count means losing the grammar. Twelve capitals, eleven inside the sentence, most of them opening verse lines. The hyphenated To-morrow is the only compound and it carries a capital as well, so it needs Shift and hyphen within three keystrokes.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg