Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium :
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004

I'm not blind to the possibility that I over-value metrical poetry because I've worked hard and long (30 years!) at understanding its mechanics and at making the stuff, but I can't let this pass. Jonathan can play Humpty Dumpty all he likes, and it won't make "I define a stressed syllable here as the main stress of a content word" have any application to metrical stress, not even in purely accentual poetry. In accentual-syllabic verse, only relative stress within a foot matters, and, given the long practice of constrained metrical substitutions, none of the lines he cites presents the slightest difficulty to traditional scansion. And while meter plays with word-boundaries, and the resultant tension is a powerful source of the rhythm of metrical lines, word boundaries are not considered in accentual-syllabic meter nor in its scansion. In the explanations below I've marked the stressed syllables of a foot by capitalizing them: surely no one needs to be reminded that this does not imply that all the upper-case bits receive the same stress and the lower-case bits are all equally whispered. In the Marvell, for example, the two metrically stressed prepositions have considerably less vocal stress than either metrically unstressed "green."

In Stevens's line, the third and fourth feet (separated here by a "-") are a common metrical variation in IP. Some call it a pyrrhic followed by spondee; the spondicidal call it a double iamb (my preferred term) or an ionic minor:

ComPLA / cenCIES / of the - PEIGNOIR, / and LATE

Frost's line puts the double iamb in the first foot, but it's the same common substitution as above:

If de - SIGN GOV / ern IN / a THING / so SMALL

Marvell's line might be read as two double iambs, but he likely thought of it as trochee iamb trochee iamb, since the most common substitution in English iambic verse is a trochee in the first foot of a line or in the first foot after a caesura or strong pause. In exactly the same way, the Henry V line is trochee iamb | trochee iamb iamb.

OF a / green THOUGHT / IN a / green SHADE

GENTly / to HEAR, | KINDly / to JUDGE, / our PLAY

Sometime in the next few days, if the creek don't rise, I'll let you know how much and when I think about these things as I'm writing a poem. The trailer says "not much anymore."


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