So much, then, for rhyme. We will approach the question of metre,
helped or unhelped by rhyme, in another way; and a way yet more
practical.
When Milton (determined to write a grand epic) was casting about
for his subject, he had a mind for some while to attempt the
story of "Job." You may find evidence for this in a MS preserved
here in Trinity College Library.
You will find printed evidence in a passage of his "Reason of
Church Government":
'Time serves not now,' he writes, 'and perhaps I might seem too
profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in
the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to
herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether
that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other
two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a
brief model ...'
Again, we know "Job" to have been one of the three stories
meditated by Shelley as themes for great lyrical dramas, the
other two being the madness of Tasso and "Prometheus Unbound."
Shelley never abandoned this idea of a lyrical drama on Job; and
if Milton abandoned the idea of an epic, there are passages in
"Paradise Lost" as there are passages in "Prometheus Unbound"
that might well have been written for this other story. Take the
lines
Why am I mock'd with death, and lengthen'd out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality my sentence, and be earth
Insensible! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap! There I should rest
And sleep secure;...