Milton's Epic Similes

This is a figure of speech particularly appropriate to epic poetry. Homer uses them extensively (they are sometimes called 'Homeric similes'), Virgil elaborated them further, and Virgil was subsequently the model for epic poetry in Western Europe. In English verse we find extended similes in Spenser's Faerie Queene (and allegory is itself a kind of ongoing simile), and they are brought to a peak of sustained sophistication by Milton. Epic similes appear throughout Paradise Lost and though each needs to be considered separately we can venture the following general remarks about them:

• Because epic similes demand careful attention they slow down our reading; and by their nature they freeze the narrative. This helps to achieve the stately pace appropriate to the gravity of epic.
• Epic similes usually describe actions rather than objects. Thus individual movements and gestures are given great emphasis and significance, again contributing to a solemn, ceremonial tone.
• They are a baroque ornamental device, which extends the range of imagery vastly beyond the immediate setting of the narrative.
• Epic similes are virtuosic, demonstrating the learning and imagination of the writer and appealing to the educated reader (indeed, they are an important part of the education of the reader: this is a traditional relation fo reader to text that we need to rememebr whenever we put ourselves in the position of analyst).
• Epic similes relate to action, character and theme by amplifying significant aspects of what they describe. For example, Satan in Hell is like a sea monster not just because he is big, but also because he is destructive. By comparing events in the immediate narrative to later history Milton also collapses chronology and implies the universal relevance of his subject matter.

Here is a discussion of the epic simile at work in a passage from Book III (lines 430-441).

Here walked the Fiend at large in spacious field.
As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey
To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids
On hills where flocks are fed, flies toward the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany wagons light:
So on this windy sea of land, the Fiend
Walked up and down alone bent on his prey ...

As we know, a simile compares a to b. So we may begin by asking, what is being compared to what here? With an epic simile, we should look for an action rather than a thing. The action being described here is walked (line 1 of passage) - this is known as the control, or tenor of the simile. The action walked is compared to the journey of the vulture, which is the vehicle.

Characteristically, the action in the simile is extended, becoming a mini-narrative concentrically enfolded by the episode and the larger narrative schemes beyond: the vulture starts in a rugged, hostile place (Imaus) and leaves this place with little food ('scarce of prey') to seek prey in the more fertile lands of India; but on the way he comes to the barren Chinese desert. Each detail of this 'story' is a precisely chosen point of comparison, as we can see by thinking of it like this:

Vehicle: Tenor
Vulture is a bird of prey: Satan is destructive, a predatory enemy of man.
Vulture (V) is looking for prey: Satan (S) is actively seeking out man to corrupt him.
V starts in Imaus (hostile): S starts in Hell.
V bound in by Tartary (Siberia): S's Inferno -'Tartarus' means 'infernal region' in classical epic.
V scents its prey from a great distance (17th c. belief): Satan's evil intelligence leads him to man.
V flies: S has flown to earth
V wants to gorge lambs and kids: S wants to corrupt innocence (lamb symbolic of purity, Christ)
V seeks a mild, fertile place: S seeks Eden
V lands midway in the desert: S has arrived in a wilderness on his way to Eden.
Chinese desert is 'sea on land', the confusion of elements: Satan brings confusion to earth.

Each detail in the simile goes beyond visual vividness to tell us something about Satan. In the course of the epic simile, the physical world reveals its property as an infinite store of symbols, pointing us to the inner meaning of the cosmos. There is still another level of meaning achieved through the use of allusion (echoing another text). Walked seems a surprisingly everyday verb to build the whole simile on, but its force is greatly increased if we reflect on the reference to Job I.7:

And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down on it.

The first temptation of man is thus linked to the Old Testament testing of Job: by extension, Adam and Job are Everyman, in continual danger from his restless, roving enemy. There is a further possible allusion in the reference to Tartarus: it was Genghis Khan who broke Tartary's bounds to lead his destructive hordes westwards.

The pedagogical function of the lines depends for its efficacy on the pleasurable exercise it gives the reader's imagination: we have been taken on an exhilarating inner journey through the landscapes of Tartary, India and China (and, as with any epic simile, there is the demand to hold the story in our minds while we read the simile, and then return to it). Intellectually, the passage has taken us into areas such as the bible, history, higher learning and popular belief. The ornamental surface carries an abstract thematic depth.

Renaissance Political Philosophy

Renaissance art and literature often shows a deep interest in politics, the arrangement of human society. Many of Shakespeare's plays, for example, investigate ways of managing and mismanaging states, and the consequences of decisions made at the top. This is most obviously the case with the History Plays, but it is also at the centre of the tragedies (King Lear begins with the disastrously bad idea of fragmenting a state) and even a romance like The Tempest, where the island setting works as a commentary on the ordering of a commonwealth and the duties of a ruler. The note below on political philosophies in the early modern period may, I hope, give a helpful idea of the main ideas in circulation.

 

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of the modern state. The general model was that of authoritarian monarchies ruling over extended territories, protected by permanent armies. These armies had to be funded from taxes, which in turn necessitated a central bureaucracy. This arrangement in turn required some theoretical justification, which was provided by writings on forms of government, which we would now call political philosophy. In the Tudor period, some of these were in the medieval tradition of Advice to Princes: the deeds of great men of the past were held up as case studies, and princes were encouraged to practise the Christian virtues of  Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence and Justice. In addition were the princely virtues of liberality, magnificence, clemency, honour and the keeping of good faith. In English the Mirror for Magistrates (first published 1559), a collection initially of nineteen English poems by various hands, had this purpose: the falls of great men of the past are held up for examination (typically, these leaders are ghosts examining themselves in a mirror) so that present-day magistrates can learn from the errors of their forebears.  Plutarch’s Lives, in the 1579 translation of Sir Thomas North (1535-c.1601), similarly used biography as a way of inculcating moral awareness, especially in those of positions of power.

Narratives with a moral purpose did not, though, study the workings of the state as a whole. Interest in this subject was induced by the real changes in political organisation of the time, and by the study of ancient texts. For Italian humanists such as Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) and Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), the writings of the ancients provided a model of how the public realm might be organised. These writings might take the form of treatises, like Plato’s Republic and Laws, which theorised about the organisation of the realm, or histories like Livy’s, which described states in action. Underlying the ‘civic humanism’ which applied ancient writings to present political realities was a powerful belief in the capacities of human will and reason. Through these, man can improve his condition; by the right exercise of reason, humans can amend imperfections such as injustice and inequality, and strive for a perfect polity in this life. Like the medieval books of advice to princes, the humanist belief in a better future modelled on the wisdom of antiquity posited humans as perfectible creatures, designed to use reason to serve their higher needs and capable of moral improvement. Plato, Aristotle, and St Thomas all hold that the good functioning of the state depends on the virtues of governors and citizens: to be virtuous is to be honest, sincere, just and pious; and man, as a rational creature, can be educated to put the general good before his own. Such sentiments perhaps found their purest expression in the genre of the utopia. Their idealism was countered, however, by the realism of the two most important theorists of politics of the sixteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Jean Bodin (1530-1596).

Machiavelli’s short book The Prince (1513) had a powerful and lasting impact. It was written in exile, as the author, an experienced diplomat who had served at the courts of France and Rome, had been deposed from his post in the Chancellery of Florence in 1512. Machiavelli contemplated the birth of the modern state - the word replaces res publica in the first page of The Prince – which had left the Italian peninsula behind. Power lay with the big nation states such as France and Spain (and, increasingly, England) while Italy (which was not a nation state until the nineteenth century) was a conglomeration of fundamentally weak small states, squabbled over by the larger powers of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Although immersed in humanist culture, with a deep knowledge of Cicero, Boethius, Seneca and Livy, Machiavelli did not share the Humanist faith in the innate goodness of man, which will ensure the eventual triumph of virtue. For him, experience shows that a ruler following moral precepts, such as those espoused in books of Advice to Princes, would only achieve disaster. In The Prince, Machiavelli sets out to answer the question: what is the best way to organize a cohesive and permanent state, and thereby best ensure for its citizens some degree of liberty and security? The task of the book is to provide a practical answer to this question, not a theoretical ideal one in the tradition of Plato.

In Machiavelli’s project, experience is to be taken as the guide. A knowledge of history and attentive observation of human affairs are fundamental necessities, and reflection on them will yield reliable maxims. One such reflection is that man is not a rational creature, designed to do good and live well. Experience tells us that man is perfidious: he can be wicked and envious, and the best response to that is not to attempt to reform him by an idealist education but to manage him appropriately and form the state on the realistic basis of how humans actually are, not how we would like them to be. Machiavelli’s doctrine of the reason of state holds that all means necessary must be employed to establish a powerful state in the collective interest; since humans are essentially selfish, they will pursue their own needs rather than the general wellbeing, and so must be compelled, by whatever means, to do the right thing. In the course of pursuing the greater good building the commonweal, the Prince is justified in doing wrong, including acts of violence and terror. For Machiavelli, virtù is not an abstract list of moral principles but the excellence particular to the ruler - that is, his success in achieving the intended goal. Hence the doctrine that ‘the end justifies the means’.

The type of state that will best ensure the collective good is a secondary concern. In The Prince Machiavelli argues for a principality. In the Discourses on Livy (1513), he praises the Roman republic (a republic being a commonwealth where power is distributed and not invested in one single leader). The overriding concern is the primacy of the collective over the individual good. A good republic makes the power of the state superior to that of factions; its leader - whose individual power will be limited by the constitution - will strengthen the state, for example through laws imposing conformity on the multitude: religion can explicitly be used for this end. A republic can draw on the best elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy to achieve the best possible balance between nobility and the people. In both The Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli refuses to idealize human nature. His aim is to find the best possible system of government on the basis of what we know humans to be like. His method of obtaining general precepts from observation has led to him being considered the founder of politics as an empirical science. The Prince was not published in England until 1640, but it was well known to writers before that. In several sixteenth-century writings, ‘Machiavel’ is the diabolical bogeyman ‘old Nick’: this is the figure we see in the character of Lorenzo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and as the Prologue to Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.  These characterisations owe much to French anti-Florentine propaganda, and to post-Reformation hostility to Italian states in England itself. They certainly do not indicate a general refutation in England of Machiavelli’s picture of human nature, which must have been confirmed by ordinary experience. A Machiavellian concern with the real behaviour of flawed humans in distant and recent history can be seen in works like Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and Tamburlaine, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and Jonson’s Sejanus. Bacon wrote: ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do and not what they ought to do’ (Anatomy of Learning (1605), II.xxii.9).

As we have seen, Machiavelli drew on history as the best introduction to politics, a method he continued in his history of Florence (1525). The same approach was taken by the French writer Jean Bodin (1530-1596), in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Understanding of History, 1566). Like Machiavelli, Bodin was concerned with real events rather than ideal concepts: in this book his interests include the effects of geography on different peoples, the way a state functions as an institution, and how international relations may be influenced by economic factors. Bodin’s interest in inflation gives him some claim to be the founder of the science of political economy. His most sustained study of statecraft is the Six Livres de la République (1576), published ten years later in an extended Latin version.  This work is an extended justification of absolutism. It was based on the observation of the bloody conflict between the Huguenots (French Protestants) and the Catholic League, which had caused appalling misery to the French people. Bodin saw the monarch as a necessary balancing figure, beyond parties and sects: absolutism was the best defence against anarchy and civil strife, and the security it brought was the precondition for tolerance, an ideal which Bodin promoted. Just as a family needs a paterfamilias, Bodin argued, a state naturally requires a supreme authority: this sovereignty, however, is a concept, not a person. It is ‘the supreme power over citizens and subjects, not limited by the law’ (I.8), since it is itself the law-maker. Sovereignty might lie with the person of the monarch, but it can equally well lie with an assembly: its chief responsibilities are to create judges, legislate and declare war; it is inalienable and indivisible, though it can delegate certain executive functions. How sovereignty is to be acquired, and whether power gained through violence itself legitimises the governing authority remain obscure points. But the main message of the work, in contrast to certain elements of Platonic philosophy and the utopian communism described by More, is that absolute power is the most natural defence of civil peace.

It will be noted that neither Machiavelli nor Bodin were arguing for anything resembling democracy. Such suffrage as existed, such as in the Republican government of Florence in the fifteenth century, was inevitably controlled by a few powerful families such as the Medici. The argument that the forceful exercise of power by the sovereign over the whole state was the best available form of government is echoed in the numerous books on government of the period. Many of these are in Latin, such as John Case’s Sphaera Civitatis (1588), a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics which recommends the perfect monarch as the ideal form of government. In English, Part I of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) accepts that society is a hierarchical pyramid, with a single ruler at the top. Monarchy is described as the most natural and best form of government, and its divine sanction is clearly shown in the Bible. In the seventeenth century, absolutism was once again recommended by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1648). The natural state of things is one of ‘war of all against all’ as individuals struggle to meet their basic needs. Life in this natural state is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (xiii). In order to live as a community, individuals need to give authority to a sovereign authority, preferably a monarch. This is the beginnings of social contract theory: individuals resign many of their freedoms to an authority, which in turn protects them as a collective body. Social contract theory was further developed by John Locke (1632-1704) in Two Treatises on Government (1690), and, later, by Rousseau.

Political ideas are particularly liable to be diminished by summary: to reduce Machiavelli to the quote ‘the end justifies the means’ or Hobbes to ‘nature is red in tooth and claw’ is to turn a rich and organic process of thought into a single glib formulation. The books of Machiavelli, Elyot and Hobbes all reward study not as background to literature but as literary texts in themselves, making subtle and expressive use of language through the stylistic and logical devices of rhetoric and logical argument. In texts more usually studied in literature courses, the forms of government and their flaws are a frequent theme: Shakespeare’s Roman plays investigate and dramatise the use, misuse and varied distribution of power. They certainly do not advocate popular rule, whatever the vices of rulers: a classless and democratic society was unthinkable as a practical option, except in the fantastic world of utopias, and we should beware of hopefully making the values of Renaissance texts correspond to our own. It can be helpful to remember that the Renaissance was haunted by the threat of civil war: the Wars of the Roses – described in Samuel Daniel’s long poem The Civil Wars (1609), among other works - were not a distant memory in England; and the Thirty Years war and wars of religion in France of the sixteenth century were a reminder of the calamities ensuing on the absence of a central authority. Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays paint a vivid picture of the miseries of internecine struggle: ‘No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood’ (H41, I.i., 5-6). In his epic Pharsalia, on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, the Roman poet Lucan (39-65 AD) inspired numerous seventeenth-century writers, and Hobbes’s advocacy of absolutism was a response to the travails of England’s own civil wars. While Milton’s defence of regicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649) seems to have had little influence beyond the Commonwealth period, a lasting strand of republican thought has been traced in England by the scholar David Norbrook.  Political ideas were in any event central to literary activity in the Renaissance; and politically intended critical enquiries, such as those pursued by cultural materialism remind us that the poetic and the political are inseparable.

Further Reading
Machiavelli, The Prince
Andrew Edward, Jean Bodin on Sovereignty, Republics of Letters

Mikael Hornqvist, 'Renaissance Political Philosophy', from The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (2011).

David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Quentin Skinner: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1978). Vol1, The Renaissance; Vol 2, The Age of Reformation. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 1981).

Milton's Punctuation

If there were a competition for the driest blogpost title, this would be a contender. Yet there is a particular interest in the punctuation of literary texts, an interest aroused in me by graduate studies (many years ago) in paleography and the editing of medieval texts - Oxford's solid philological tradition - and by a subsequent reading of Malcolm Parkes's Pause and Effect and John Lennard's The Poetry Handbook, which pays detailed attention to this rather esoteric aspect of poetic craft (Lennard studied with Parkes at some stage, I think).

Punctuation matters. Careful writers - perhaps you and I on a good day - choose punctuation marks with the same care as they choose words. Broadly speaking these marks work in three ways - visually, aurally and logically. For example, the colon (1) helps us to see the segments of a sentence or period on the page, (2) creates an emphatic pause which we hear, and (3) suggests some logical connection between what precedes and follows it, thus guiding our understanding of the sense of a passage.

Too often, printers and editors alter authorial punctuation. But when we can be sure we are seeing the original (or at any rate, something roughly contemporary with the original, and thus conforming to many of the same conventions), it will repay our critical attention. Below I discuss the part punctuation plays in some lines from Milton. Familiar terms are used in the following ways, with bold and italics distinguishing where the same word is used to indicate the graphic mark or a sequence of text.

A colon (plural cola) indicates the mark :
A colon (plural cola) indicates everything written between cola, ie the segment of text which terminates in this mark (or a full stop).

A semi-colon (pl semi-cola) indicates the mark ;
A semi-colon (pl semi-cola) indicates the texts terminating in the mark ; or, again, with a terminal stop.

Similarly, a comma is the mark, and a comma (pl commata) refers to the words enclosed by commas.

A sentence is a grammatical statement with, normatively, a subject and verb which makes independent sense. It does not necessarily end with a full stop (though it normally terminates in one o the marks including a stop (?!;:.).

A period is a complete line of thought, which may contain several grammatical sentences, and which ends in a full stop (still called a 'period' in American English, recalling the earlier rhetorical tradition which Milton and others worked within).

An early modern writer like Milton typically composes not primarily in sentences, but in periods. To get a feel for this, we have to extend our view beyond the sentence, which is generally taught as the largest grammatical unit today. A rough equivalent to a Miltonic period would be the paragraph, a  gathering of sentences to make a cohesive larger statement. Another analogy is to see the punctuation marks as the joints of a limb, articulating the various members and holding them together to form a greater whole.

Simply to get our eye in, we can have a look at the 'joints' of a representative portion of text, Paradise Lost, Book X, lines 312-24. Text and notes are from the Dartmouth hypertext edition:

Now had they brought the work by wondrous Art
Pontifical, a ridge of pendent Rock
Over the vext Abyss, following the track
Of Satan, to the self same place where hee [ 315 ]
First lighted from his Wing, and landed safe
From out of Chaos to the out side bare
Of this round World: with Pinns of Adamant
And Chains they made all fast, too fast they made
And durable; and now in little space [ 320 ]
The confines met of Empyrean Heav'n
And of this World, and on the left hand Hell
With long reach interpos'd; three sev'ral wayes
In sight, to each of these three places led.

Stripped down eccentrically to punctuation marks only, this passage becomes ,,,,:  ,;,;. The period is composed of two cola, around the pivotal colon (line 318). The first colon has four commas (none of them, we note, at the end of a line, the medial placement creating a series of cross-rhythms) and thus five grammatical commata. The second colon comprises three semi-cola. The first two semi-cola have two commata each. Without commas, the main structure is clearly : ; ; . The limb of the period is in two halves, and the second half has two smaller joints (the semi-cola) holding it together. The whole period resembles the classical period of four cola. A further analogy is the renaissance altarpiece,  which is composed of various leaves (typically a diptych or triptych, but often with further sections), making a single work composed of distinct images - as foreign to prevailing conceptions of the artwork as Milton's periods are to those of the modern notion of sentence / statement.

Now we have identified the joints (or leaves), we are in a better position to follow the current of thought. Let us consider a longer period, also from Paradise Lost (the opening of Book IX).


First Colon

NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest
With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast, permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblam'd:

This is the first colon, ending midway through line 5, where the colon acts as a brake against the metrical momentum. It provides a link to the preceding book, referring to the scene we have just left: the poet tells us he will move on from the happy scene of man talking amicably with angels. There are five commata, the first two embracing the subject, and each of the last three giving an image of a particular action: used to sit ... partake ... permitting. These are non-finite verbal forms (two infinitives and a participle), suggesting the timeless, unhurried nature of such discourse.  The colon is placed to create a pause for reflection, significantly pointing the key word unblam'd, which summarises man's lost innocence.

Second Colon

I now must change [ 5 ]
Those Notes to Tragic; foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,
And disobedience:

The second colon explains why there can be 'No more' of this pleasant theme. It is made up of two semi-cola. The first of these announces the change of subject; the second unpacks the full sense of the key word Tragic and takes us to the momentous word disobedience (the negative prefix echoing unblam'd at the conclusion of the previous colon). The four commata list, with cumulative force, the crimes of man (distrust, breach disloyal, revolt, disobedience): these stark nouns offer a tonal contrast to the actions described in the first colon. We notice, too, the semantic aptness of breach / Disloyal being visually prised apart by a line break, a graphic representation of the rift between God and man.

Third Colon

On the part of Heav'n
Now alienated, distance and distaste,
Anger and just rebuke, and judgement giv'n, [ 10 ]
That brought into this World a world of woe,
Sinne and her shadow Death, and Miserie
Deaths Harbinger:

The second colon explained the first, and anatomised the elements of man's revolt. It moved us on from a timeless then to an equally verbless Now. The relation between colon 2 and colon 3 is that of cause and effect, as we learn of heaven's response to man's fall and the subsequent introduction of sin and death into the terrestrial sphere.

Fourth Colon

Sad task, yet argument
Not less but more Heroic then the wrauth
Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu'd [ 15 ]
Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous'd,
Or Neptun's ire or Juno's, that so long
Perplex'd the Greek and Cytherea's Son;
If answerable style I can obtaine [ 20 ]
Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes
Her nightly visitation unimplor'd,
And dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires
Easie my unpremeditated Verse:

Now that the subject matter of the Fall has been outlined, the fourth colon reflects on it as suitable matter for epic verse. What is a heroic subject? The link between Milton's work and ancient epic is the theme of vengeance and retribution by the mighty (and indeed almighty). This colon digresses into an ostentatiously erudite riff on this subject, the commata unfolding descriptive ornamentations as the poet's mind explores the theme. The first semi-colon declares that the Fall is not less but more heroic than Achilles' combat with Hector in Homer's Iliad. The next semi-colon offers further classical examples of the theme of divine 'ire' and 'rage' in retribution. The entire colon subdivides into a tricolon, a group of three, with the third semi-colon being the longest, attaining a climactic force as it describes the nightly visitations to the poet by the Muse. The subject of the whole colon is thus the superiority of Milton's poem to ancient epic: his work, we learn, has a loftier theme, and is directly divinely inspired without human interference. But we note here that even as Milton laments man's pride in challenging a higher authority, he himself asserts his own will against the literary authority of classical poetry. At the same time, the reference to the actions of classical narratives seems a diversionary tactic, taking our view away from the total lack of memorable dramatic action in the story of fall and punishment in the Christian narrative he has outlined. The classically composed period is, we might feel, holding together a passage of thought vexed by paradox, tonal contrast, a sense of the mismatch between matter and manner in the Christian epic itself. We are given a chance to rest as the colon falls at the end of a largely iambic line.

Fifth Colon

Since first this Subject for Heroic Song [ 25 ]
Pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late;
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument
Heroic deem'd, chief maistrie to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights [ 30 ]
In Battels feign'd; the better fortitude
Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon'd Shields,
Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds; [ 35 ]
Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgious Knights
At Joust and Torneament; then marshal'd Feast
Serv'd up in Hall with Sewers, and Seneshals;
The skill of Artifice or Office mean,
Not that which justly gives Heroic name [ 40 ]
To Person or to Poem.

The fifth and final colon completes the claim for the Fall as an heroic theme by contrasting it with other epic narrative verse. Where the fourth colon dealt with ancient epic, the fifth describes more recent works. They are obsessed with boring battles, nostalgic ideas of chivalry ('tinsel Trappings'), and don't explore more interesting kinds of courage such as that of the martyrs. This great colon has no fewer than six semi-cola as Milton warms to his theme of the inferiority of everyone else's poetry to his own, in good puritanical fashion clearly showing an appetite for the kind of literary pleasures he deprecates.  The important concept word 'Heroic' appears near the end to tie the fourth and fifth cola together.

It is perhaps worth repeating the observation that Milton usually places the heavy punctuation marks not at the ends of lines but in the middle. The shape and syntax of the period creates its own rhythm on top of, and against, the vestigial iambic metre. This plays a large part in giving Milton's verse a tense and 'heavy' feel as so much seems to be calling out for emphasis.

Finally, the long period here is a demonstration of the 'Heroic' nature of poet and poem, as it shows one vast line of thought encompassing rural repasts, divine anger, Homeric epic, divine inspiration, and chivalric verse. Here is a mind thinking, planning, remembering, considering and claiming with a triumphant mental energy.

Further Reading
Brief History of Punctuation in Britannica
Stephen Reimer's course notes from University of Alberta

John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook
M B Parkes, Pause and Effect: Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Scolar Press, 1992)
Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves has a handy summary of the earlier system.