First go read the comments from yesterday, especially where Kasey and I trade prosodies.
…
Back? I could have made a better line to illustrate the last point:
But Lev/ertov's / poem / is full/ of grace
Or, better yet, I could have made a context in which the line (the third) is clearly IP:
This brok/en land/scape forms / a cruc/ible
Where hon/est mot/ives melt / like Ap/ril snows,
But Lev/ertov's / poem / is beaut/iful
Despite / the crass/ness of / the world she shows.
But looky here at the same third line:
Nothing is / left / of those / dutiful
Sons and their / deaths in that / battle now—
But Lev/ertov's / poem is / beaut/iful,
Calm as that / field filled with / cattle now.
Dactyls after all. What's up with that?
Meter is a property of a whole poem, and metrical stress is an internal feature of a foot in that meter. Only after determining the global metrical structure (which may vary from time to time) can one start assigning metrical stress. Those assignments completely ignore the relative stress of syllables outside the foot in question, and do not necessarily have a strong relation to speech stress. Indeed, many and perhaps most iambic pentameter lines have only four beats. No sensible person reading aloud the last line of my ginned-up pentameter quatrain above would give "of" anything like the emphasis of the other four metrical stresses in the line. And yet a strongly established IP context will give it the ghost of a beat, which is what we mean by metrical promotion — and one proof of well-handled meter is its ability to perform such promotions (and demotions) subtly and effectively. (Note well that I do not claim that's what I've done above.)
That can't (and shouldn't) happen in Levertov's "O Taste and See." Her opening linebreaks resist any iambic impulse from alternating stresses, and look what happens in the middle:
tongue
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
Even if this weren't a list, encouraging strong separation and parallelism between each item, 13 of 22 syllables have strong stresses — 3 in a row at first! What metrical expectations could that generate which might alter, however subtly, the way one speaks some subsequent line? And what on earth would it mean to treat the whole thing as a metrical form?
If you're interested, I've blogged before about metrical promotion here and about the rhythmic difference between metrical and non-metrical enjambment last December in the posts labeled "Broken Lines, part x."
9:09:50 PM 
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