In John Milton’s magnificent Paradise Lost, the reader immediately notices that his sentences are very, very long; and yet, easy to read. The reader never gets lost. Why not?
Because Milton’s sentences are composed of short phrases and clauses that link component to component.
Here is the first sentence of Paradise Lost, with its original spelling and punctuation from the revised second edition of 1674:
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
That’s a magnificent, sonorous sentence of 121 words, which fills about one third of a paperback’s page. It is composed of eighteen short phrases and clauses, each linking with the next, to form one complex idea.
Here is the word count of each phrase or clause in that first sentence:
4, 7, 8, 4, 4, 6, 5, 3, 7, 3, 4, 6, 12, 7, 11, 9, 12, 10.
I paged randomly through the entire poem and selected long sentences, then counted the words in the phrases or clauses of each sentence; and here are the results:
2, 3, 3, 7, 6, 6, 12, 3, 3, 3, 6, 5, 9, 3, 7, 4, 2, 3, 5.
2, 11, 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 8, 8, 3, 2, 6, 3, 4, 2, 5, 2, 8, 6, 5, 5, 3, 5, 3, 6.
2, 3, 3, 7, 4, 1, 10, 1, 4, 7, 5, 11, 6, 5, 11.
11, 6, 5, 5, 5, 8, 10, 5, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 1, 4, 6, 5.
Then I looked carefully through all 218 pages of the poem and found not a single clause longer than sixteen words. If it is there, somewhere, it is as secretive as the invisible Satan when he slithers through the void back to his throne in hell.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.