On the metrical board that I moderate, fug posted a poem whose final stanza goes:
We care no more nor mourn,
our ash-clothes are our dress-suits;
we dance to notes from death-flutes;
our tumbled gods reborn.
A pattern of feminine rhyme was sustained in lines 2&3 of quatrains throughout the poem. One respondant complained of a metrical shift in the final stanza. I disputed this point, saying that the last syllables of those lines dropped stress in comparison with the preceeding ones. In such instances I find Steele's four-level scansion helpful to explain subtleties of rhythm that binary scansion cannot adequately convey. We scan a pattern of relative stress.
Alan Sullivan
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