I lied. There's really no way, in the hour or so I might have for blogging, to seriously address accentual-syllabic prosody. Nor is there any need for any cute monkey, let alone an old fat grey one like me, to defend metrical practice from ignorant ranting. But there are, maybe, a couple of common misconceptions about meter that I can clear up.
The first is that metrical stress distorts the ordinary rhythms of speech, forcing unnatural emphasis on unimportant words. You've all heard it done:
The GREAT ofFENsive IN the EAST beGAN
this MORNing AS our FORCes OVerRAN
Despite that being an accurate scansion, no one with a feel for the language or for meter would read the lines from Dana Gioia's "News from Nineteen Eighty-Four" that way. There are three, or perhaps four, speech stresses in each, and they coincide with the metrical stresses in a normative iambic pentameter. So do "in" and "as," but they are certainly not stressed in a good reading. Nevertheless, it is no distortion for "in" to take slightly more emphasis than "sive," or "as" more than "ing."
Now, meter can sometimes guide us how to read. In that same poem, after 27 lines of almost completely regular pentameter (two initial trochees in the third stanza and some feminine endings are hardly variations), the fourth stanza begins "The fires at the docks have been contained," which, in another poem, could easily be scanned The FIRES at the DOCKS have BEEN conTAINED — iamb, anapest, iamb, iamb, a foot short. Here, however, "fire" is helped by the meter to its full dipthonged glory, rhyming with "higher," and perhaps slowing the line down to allow a very slight touch on "at."
A second misconception is that a metrical scheme requires that every foot in a poem conform to that scheme.* As it happens, "News from Nineteen Eighty-Four" is dedicated to James Fenton, who wrote a metrical analysis of Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break," which demonstrates just how much variation is possible. Most of the poem is vaguely anapestic trimeter, but the first lines of stanzas one and four are just the three words of the title, and the third lines of stanzas three and four are tetrameter. Only three lines are purely anapestic; only one pair of consecutive lines (the beginning of the third stanza) has exactly the same scansion in each line. In lesser hands it would be a riot, but Tennyson has made it a marvelously expressive series of variations.
My only complaint about Fenton's piece is that, at its end, he makes Tennyson seem an unselfconscious wild thing "exerting his free will" who would necessarily have hesitated before describing the prosody of his poem. Horse-hockey. Tennyson may not have begun thinking "Why don't I start a poem with something really obscure, like a molossus?" but he damned sure knew that that was what he had done.
*Yeah, I know, I just wrote that knowing a line to be pentameter can stretch "fire" into two syllables. But we do sometimes say it that way, and, even so, only an extremely regular meter allows such things. BTW, that near-lock-step meter is appropriate to the theme of Gioia's poem, but his expressive and skillful line-breaks and caesura-juggling keep it from being rhythmically boring. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
9:20:46 PM 
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