Forsake me not thus, Adam, witness heaven
What love sincere, and reverence in my heart
I bear thee, and unweeting have offended,
Unhappily decEiVEd; thy suppliant
I beg, and clasp thy knees; bereave me not,
Whereon I live, thy gentle looks …

In this word, I hear the real effects of Eve's sin (and I imagine she does, too), communicated through the form of syllabic wordplay.² Indeed, Eve is "unhappily decEiVEd", if we spell out the word's dual — what Wallace Stevens calls "every latent double in the word"³ — we can say that she is "dis-Eve'd." She has, obeying Satan, lost her identity, no longer the Eve God created, not yet the Eve she will become. Milton uses identical wordplay in Book 9. First, as Eve prepares to follow the serpent, the narrator exclaims:

0 much decEiVEd, much failing, hapless EVE,
Of thy presumed return! EVEnt pErVErse!
Thou nEVEr from that hour in Paradise
Found'st either sweet repast, or sound repose.

Eve is not only now "dis-Eve'd"; she is also, as this passage illustrates, dismembered in a graphic sparagmos, her name scattered across the ensuing lines like fragments of her former self. Next, recall also that, at the moment of Adam's fall, the narrator declares: [x]

    The justification for the reissue of a book some seven years old must lie first and foremost in its usefulness. I am persuaded of the usefulness of Milton, Poet of Duality by the sales of the first printing — it sold out. I am also, and more strongly, persuaded by the number of communications, direct and indirect, from colleagues around the world who have consulted the book and asked their students to consult it, too: they confirm unanimously the usefulness of the book and their satisfaction as well at its reappearance in an affordable paper edition.
    This because the book maps, as no other book before or since has, the extent of Milton's "phonetic sensibility" (Partridge) or what I prefer to call simply his "syllabics": no poet in English, except possibly Shakespeare, exploits the "inside" of words, their syllables, as Milton does. In Milton, semiosis, the production of signs and signification out of the elements of words, can be systematically mapped with results so extraordinary that they constitute in effect a new method for reading his poetry.⁶
    In the remainder of this Preface to the new printing, I intend to sketch in an instance of these results — hence of the method, too — as a demonstration of the usefulness of the book. This has seemed to me the most worthwhile response to the occasion afforded me by its reissue.

    Consider the following list of words: sin, Eden, serpent, garden, women, men, inward. The semiosis of these words involves the productivity of the syllable in/en.⁷  Shortly after publishing Milton, Poet [xi] of Duality the first time, I began preparing several essays that related indirectly to it but for that reason had not been included in it.⁸ During work on these studies I was acutely aware of syllabification in Paradise Lost because of my then recent study of the syllable -pair in the poem (see below, pp. 15-17 especially). This awareness led to my discovery of the wordplay with the name Eve in Paradise Lost 9 and 10 in the word "decEiVEd." Realizing the extent to which Milton's ear perceives meaning in syllables — becoming familiar with his "syllabics," in other words — I began to read and reread the poem so as to train my own ear accordingly. Gradually, I began to hear the syllable in/en, especially in Book 9; words like sin, Eden, serpent, garden, women, men, inward suddenly appeared to me in patterns of repetition that were markedly systematic. Consider, then, for example, the following passage, which gives one particularly vivid illustration of the semiotic productivity of in/en:⁹

1 So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
2 Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat:
3 Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
4 Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
5 That all was lost. Back to the Thicket slunk
6 The guiltie Serpent, and well might, for Eve
7 Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else
8 Regarded, such delight till then, as seemd,
9 In Fruit she never tasted, whether true
10 Or fansied so, through expectation high
11 Of knowledg, nor was God-head from her thought.
12 Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
13 And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length,
14 And hight'nd as with Wine, jocond and boon,
15 Thus to her self she pleasingly began.
16 0 Sovran, vertuous, precious of all Trees
17 In Paradise, of operation blest
18 To Sapience, hitherto obscur'd, infam'd,
19 And thy fair Fruit let hang, as to no end
20 Created; but henceforth my early care,
21 Not without Song, each Morning, and due praise
22 Shall tend thee, and the fertil burden ease
23 Of thy full branches offer'd free to all;
24 Till dieted by thee I grow mature
25 In knowledge, as the Gods who all things know;
26 Though others envie what they cannot give; [xii]
27 For had the gift bin theirs, it had not here
28 Thus grown. Experience, next to thee I owe,
29 Best guide; not following thee, I had remaind
30 In ignorance, thou op'nst Wisdoms way,
31 And giv'st access, though secret she retire.
32 And I perhaps am secret; Heav'n is high,
33 High and remote to see from thence distinct
34 Each thing on Earth; and other care perhaps
35 May have diverted from continual watch
36 Our great Forbidder, safe with all his Spies
37 About him. But to Adam in what sort
38 Shall I appeer? shall I to him make known
39 As yet my change, and give him to partake
40 Full happiness with mee, or rather not,
41 But keep the odds of Knowledge in my power
42 Without Copartner? so to add what wants
43 In Femal Sex, the more to draw his Love,
44 And render me more equal, and perhaps,
45 A thing not undesireable, somtime
46 Superior; for inferior who is free?
47 This may be well: but what if God have seen.
48 And Death ensue? then I shall be no more,
49 And Adam wedded to another Eve,
50 Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
51 A death to think. Confirm'd then I resolve;
52 Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe:
53 So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
54 I could endure, without him live no life. 

Here the syllable in/en occurs 51 times in 54 lines; other passages of similar or greater density can be found in the last four books of Paradise Lost (e.g., 9.96-178 [88 occurrences in 82 lines] or 9.494-510 [18 in 17 lines]. Such passages suggest that Paradise Lost shows a marked increase in words containing this syllable in those books concerned with events just before, during, and after the Fall — the first sin.

    Using concordances and indices I have generated with electronic copies of Paradise Lost, I have isolated 869 words with the syllable of [xiii] sin in the poem appearing in 1,459 total forms occurring over 6,300 times.¹⁰ As will be obvious, the files and print-outs of these data must be massive and lengthy, and I can not print them all here. I do, however, provide an Appendix to this preface, a chart of the core vocabulary I am investigating, and I recommend that readers glance at it now to familiarize themselves with its content and shape.
    Two incidental observations before I proceed. All the concordances and indices I am preparing exclude the verbal ending -ing when it is just that, a termination denoting the progressive form of the verb. In other words, I distinguish carefully between, for example, going and gardning — the former an almost inescapable element of the English verb's morphology, the latter a verbal-noun much more optional in the language and hence available for both dis- and re-ambiguation (as, for example, in the syllabic pun g[u]ardning). My list of occurrences, then, does not include any verb ending in -ing just because it ends in -ing.
    Next, my list of primary vocabulary does not count the many different forms in which a given word can appear. An excellent example of the issue here is the word envie, which appears in Paradise Lost as envied, envier, envies, enviest, envious, envy, envying. Hence the distinction I made above between words and forms — 869 words appearing in 1,459 total forms. Loosely speaking, I could say that there are 1,459 words with the syllable in/en in Paradise Lost, but that would be speaking loosely, and I prefer to distinguish between words and forms for the sake of greater accuracy.

    The Appendix is a table of thirty-three words, central I believe to the vocabulary of in/en words in Paradise Lost. The table indicates these words in the number of occurrences each shows in its various forms in the twelve books of the poem. The crucial statistic on which I wish to focus here is the relation of total number of occurrences in books 1-8 to total number of occurrences in books 9-12. In books 1-8, the words occur 289 times or an average of 36 times a book. In books 9-12, they occur 256 times or an average of 64 times a book. The simple arithmetic here is impressive: 64 is 1.78 times greater than 36; that is to say, words with the syllable of sin [xiv] from this list occur per book 1.78 more times or 78 percent more often in books 9-12 than they do in books 1-8. Another way of representing the ratio would be to factor 256 in relation to the total number of occurrences indicated in this table, which is 545 (289 + 256): in this factor, 46.97 percent of the words with the syllable in/en from this list are seen to occur in books 9-12 — almost half, in other words, nearly 50 percent, occur in the third third of the poem.
    As we know from medieval lore, auctoritas habet nasam ceream, "authority has a waxen nose," and perhaps no authority is potentially more waxen, we would probably agree, than that of statistics. Just so, I do not pretend here to suggest that these figures and percentages are anything other than gross calculations of certain recurring patterns and tendencies in Paradise Lost. But if they are only that, they are still calculations that the literary critic can use in an effort to understand the problem of poetic form.

    If you look back at Eve's lengthy speech quoted earlier and read it very slowly, you can hear the ominous echo of sin in her new-fallen discourse. You can hear the extent to which the serpent, out of his ancient enmity and lust for vengeance, having entered the garden of Eden, has penetrated Eve's mind and bent it through the experience of inabstinence to his infernal intent of original sin. You can hear, in short, how Milton, or any of us, could write the whole history of the fall out of these thirty-odd words that contain the syllable of sin.
    The syllable in/en is so important to Milton because serving as the sound of sin, its prolific prefix- and suffix-activity in a vast number of other English words argues for the contagious, contaminative confusion that sin introduces with and into signs: "and called me Sin and for a sign / Portentous held me" (PL 2.760-61; emphasis added; see, further, below, pp. 23-24). Moreover, as Milton could easily have reasoned, -en, the homophone,¹¹ is especially that affix that makes verbs out of nouns and adjectives (i.e., substantives and attributes — weaken, strengthen, ripen, deepen, widen, empower, embolden, inspire); in other words, -en is the affix indicating "causing to become or resemble," or "being, becoming, or causing to be" or "causing to have or gain."¹² It [xv] suggests the contamination of being with the stain of sin when sin is understood as becoming or process which, in a certain Platonist-Christian optic, is also decay, loss, corruption.¹³ Such a suggestion makes of in/en the sound of the fallen and hence the sound with which to invent the narrative of the fall.¹⁴

    To the objection of certain currently fashionable historicisms, I would like to urge, in conclusion, that the foregoing analysis is not "sterile formalism." Formal it certainly is, but sterile I think we can agree it is not. Great as the achievements of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Serres, and others have been in teaching us that there is little if any difference between documents and monuments, that both the discourse of history and the discourse of fiction are always already rhetorically implicated in each other, we can still appreciate that if the discourse of fiction — understanding now by fiction any formal verbal artifice — is not really other than the discourse of history, it is nevertheless always more than the discourse of history: it is always the more of form and its provocative excess. If both history and poetry are contaminated with ideology and thus equally suspect, if both are "produced by" cultural forces always mystified by and mystifying of power, it is still the case that poetry by its form — above all, the form of overt and extruded repetition and its myriad attendant problematics (as in the syllable of sin) — distinguishes itself in human experience by creating and satisfying and then exciting anew the appetite for order in and through language itself.
    So it is that historicism can not only never "purge" itself of subjectivity but also should not even try since it can never "purge" itself of form without also eviscerating its human content.¹⁵ Insofar as historicism deals with the human at all, it deals with form and with artifice — with the made (poieîn) — and with their inevitable excess; it operates in the space of the aesthetic which is also the space of subjectivity. And it can achieve no objectivity at the cost of this subjectivity — such a sacrifice can only produce instead pseudo-science. Historicisms remain finally more art than science in the measure to which they understand and affirm that subjectivity is the ground, one of the limits of, human and humane objectivity. [xvi]
    My hope in reissuing Milton, Poet of Duality is that its usefulness in the study of Milton will continue and indeed increase, whether through spurring more work in Milton's "syllabics" or in inspiring other new methods for analyzing the poetry.¹⁶ Such consequences will further confirm as they celebrate Milton's profound insight that he who would understand signs must start with sin — "Of man's first disobedience ...."

¹ A. C. Partridge, The Language of Renaissance Poetry: Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970), pp. 261-312, at p. 312.

² On the complex issue of Milton's spelling and pronunciation of such words as deceived and others I discuss, I plan to publish a lengthy study in the near future, tentatively entitled "Sound Sense: Wordplay in Paradise Lost." Here it is useful to recall that Joseph H. Summers discusses "the continual recurrence of the long e's" in Book 10 and elsewhere in Paradise Lost, associating them with "the sounds of the Redeemer's speech" (in Book 3) and concluding that "Milton focused the central relationships of the poem by means of the sound of his verse." See his fine discussion in The Muse's Method: An Introduction to "Paradise Lost" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 178-85. See also Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), esp. p. 104, on Milton as "a witty as well as a profound poet." Finally, very relevant to my project is the excellent study by Neil Forsyth, "Of Man's First Dis," in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton: MRTS, 1991), pp. 345-69, an essay on the prefix dis- in Paradise Lost.

³ "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), p. 387.

⁴ Note that Milton reinforces the work of the wordplay here with the careful alternation of alliterating v's and fs: "not deceiVed, /But Fondly oVercome with Female charm" — v / f / v / f. The whole verbal environment of the passage is heavy with the sound of EVe.
    As my colleague Mark Taylor of Manhattan College has pointed out to me, line 998 could also be read to say that Adam has not been "un-Eve'd" — i. e., he has become so much an Eve that when she offers him the fruit, he is "not decEiVEd." The difference between the two readings bears reflecting upon since the latter suggests a process and continuation of "Eve-ing" Adam that Adam cannot now undo, whereas the former, presupposing a double negative, suggests that in the moment of being offered the fruit, Adam is "Eve-d." [xvii]

⁵ Look back now at the passage with which I began, this time listening even more intently for Milton's word-play:

⁶ Hence the misguidedness of such attacks on Milton, Poet of Duality as that of John Leonard in Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 7-9, 168-69. He misses the point (deliberately?) in faulting the book for "deconstruction" or reliance on Saussure: the point is not the espousal of schools or theories but the liberation that comes from practicing semiosis on Milton's syllabics — it works. For another example of its efficacy, differently motivated but frequently arriving at similar insights, see Maureen Quilligan, Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 72-78. Consult also Forsyth's essay on dis- in Paradise Lost (note 2 above).

⁷ In what follows I draw in part on my paper "in/en: The Syllable of Sin in Paradise Lost and the Syllable of Men in The Prelude, 12-14," in Romanticism: Preludes and Postludes. Essays in Honor of Edwin G. Wilson (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1993); this paper is a lengthy study in which I provide fuller charts and statistics than I am able to provide here. I have also addressed some of these issues in two recent papers: " 'For there is figures in all things': Juxtology in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton," in The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. David G. Allen and Robert White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 266-85, and "'Our Names are [xviii] Debts': Messiah's Account of Himself (Paradise Lost 3.238: `Account me man')," in Re-considering the Renaissance, Papers from the 1987 CEMERS Conference on the Renaissance (Binghamton: MRTS, 1992), pp. 461-73.

⁸These studies (including those mentioned in the preceding note) will eventually form my book, currently in progress, provisionally entitled Supposing History: The Crisis of Historicism in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

⁹A lengthy note on the text I am using is necessary here. In 1989, Roy Flannagan invited me to join a project for producing an electronic version of Milton's poetry, and shortly thereafter I began keyboarding the 1667 edition of Paradise Lost. Eventually, I produced an electronic version of 1667. Later, Roy Flannagan and I exchanged electronic texts of the 1667 and 1674 editions of Paradise Lost, and it is that exchange that enabled me to begin the systematic investigation of Paradise Lost.
    I would like to acknowledge and thank Roy Flannagan and the many colleagues involved in the project for the opportunities and help they gave me. I also want to acknowledge that they have in no way endorsed or taken official responsibility for my work, and I certainly exonerate them of any association with my opinions, conclusions, and, most importantly, errors, whether of fact or intelligence.
    Once I had both texts of Paradise Lost in electronic form, I began systematically concording the twelve books of the poem (1674). It is those concordances, indices, and word-counts that helped produce the tentative, provisional results reported here, which are thus based on, but not always identical to, the 1674 edition as found in Harris Francis Fletcher, John Milton's Complete Poetical Works, Reproduced in Photographic Facsimile, 4 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1948), vol. 3.

¹⁰ The crudeness of this computation will be evident to everyone. It would, for example, be far more informative to compute the occurrences of the syllable by character rather than by book — frequency of the syllable in a given character's speech would be a far more sensitive measure of that character's capitulation to sin. Such computation I do hope to undertake at a later point in my work on this project.
    This note is a convenient occasion for another, related comment. All of the work presented in this Preface is elementary. Even as I write, developments in computer applications in literary studies are proceeding at an ever-accelerating pace, and findings are often dated as soon as they are published because of advances in technology and theory alike. (Have we here one reason why electronic mail networks will someday replace conventional publishing to some extent?) Not that this is an unwelcome situation. To the contrary, we are in the midst of probably one of the most important revolutions in literary studies in centuries. Still, it does mean that obsolescence is common. The rewards [xix] for our patience, though, promise to be great. With all of Milton's writing, poetry and prose alike, in electronic form, we should be able to discern and analyze patterns of sound and meaning we otherwise could never have studied with the same degree of confidence. Following the lead of socio-linguistics, for example — in particular, the kinds of statistical analysis developed by Labov and others — we should be able to determine whether certain syllables "stain" various contexts (political, theological, moral, sexual, etc.) with predictably high frequencies. Thus, the syllable in may emerge in Milton as the syllable of Protestantism itself — of that inwardness (and inwordness) that most deeply characterizes the Protestant understanding of virtue, sin, and redemption.
    See, further, on computer applications in literary studies and our current needs and desiderata, the excellent remarks of Thomas N. Corns in Milton's Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 120.

¹¹ "The differences between em, en-, and im-, in- (not including the negatory prefix) cannot be established; perhaps these also represent phonetic spellings, but they are not consistent": John T. Shawcross, "Orthography and the Text of Paradise Lost," in Language and Style in Milton: A Symposium in Honor of the Tercentenary of "Paradise Lost,"ed. Ronald D. Emma and John T. Shawcross (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1967), pp. 120-53, at p. 137.

¹² I cite the American Heritage Dictionary, sub voce, for these definitions.

¹³ Such an optic as, e.g., the Augustinian, which understands evil as "privatio boni" ("absence of the good") — see the Enchiridion 10-12.

¹⁴ As Roy Flannagan has pointed out to me, the suffix -en is also a feminine syllable at the end of every word to which it is affixed. The association of the feminine with the fallen (with becoming, process, lability, etc.) is, of course, an ingrained trope of Western misogyny; and I do not adduce this idea with any pretense of "ideological innocence." At the same time, it does seem important to me, given Milton's complex attitude toward "this sex which is not one," to insist on this characteristic of the suffix -en in the context of the syllable of sin.

¹⁵ Cf. the stimulating comments on formalism and historicism by Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 32-51.

¹⁶For this reissue, I have performed a complete, fresh proofreading of the book; errors have been corrected. Any that remain I would appreciate having called to my attention either through the publisher or at my professional address. [xx]