Thank you for your explanation, Bob. I think you have helped me wrap my mind around it. It will still be some time before I can succesfully wrap my ear around it as well, and actually be able to produce an inverted iamb in a poem (except by accidentally believing I have committed a trochaic substitution).

I can almost grasp it at
The new day, and the shape of his own hand
and
To fleeting forms, a bonfire, a tornado
I had some more trouble with
And offer to me gently out of my pain
but I'll leave that job to - as you say - time and reflection.
I ask such theoretical questions because they help me read. I read all of Dante's Inferno without hearing a single iamb - simply because I wasn't looking for any. I would probably have discovered them had I read it aloud. But I didn't.

I have a very good ear for metric rhythm in song - despite being tone deaf - but I think meter in written language eluded me for a long time simply because writing means visual; you can't see an iamb. So much to catch up.

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Svein Olav

.. another life

I think I'm ready for a gin with Ralph.

Robert, your explanations just prove my point that the reader's interpretation can't be controlled when the line is in any way vague. Your explanations don't change the way that I read the lines, so for you to say that I'm wrong is just silly. People wouldn't debate these issues if there weren't legitimate reason for disagreement. Scansion isn't a monolithic theory in which there are clear rights and wrongs.

When I read this line:

For hours the convoys had rolled by (for HOURS / the CON / voys had / rolled BY)

I put no emphasis on "had", and that's that. I certainly don't read it the way Carol does, with all those stressed syllables.

I submit that there is no such thing as an "inverted iamb". There are iambs and there are trochees, and there are trochees that substitute for iambs, and vice versa, and that's it. If you say it like this -- x X -- it's an iamb; if you say it like this -- X x -- it's a trochee. If a syllable gets promoted by the meter, why confuse things with a special term? Besides, there will always be people who don't make the promotion, and that's their prerogative.

Carol, your explanations strike me as so much hand magic. I can tell when I'm stressing or not stressing a syllable, and to pretend that I'm stressing it in some subtle way, when I'm not, makes no sense to me. People seem determined to confuse matters much more than they need to be.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited September 19, 2001).]

Caleb, Carol,

those convoys have a steady iambic rhythm:

for hours / the con / voys had / rolled by
is perhaps best analysed in stress levels:

1 4 / 1 3 / 1 2 / 2 3

The third foot is a light iamb. If it had been 2 1 you would have needed to excuse it as trochaic substitution.

As for the inverted iamb, even this foreigner could hear it in two of Bob's examples.

Caleb, you analyse in terms of stress. So when you write, you truly write in stressual-syllabic meter. But the English (and German) standard is accentual-syllabic meter, and it is within that standard that inverted iambs and comparable beasts exist. Stress and accent follow each other quite close, but sometimes they part. Then you must make a choice.
It's perfectly legitimate to write in something other than the standard - like stressual-syllabic meter - as long as you remember that it is not identical to the accentual-syllabic standard.

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Svein Olav

.. another life

For hours the convoys had rolled by

Svein, now that I've said it 50 times, I find that I can give a little emphasis to "had" without any awkwardness, but in the beginning I couldn't say it that way. The problem with the line is that, on first reading, I expected "rolled" to take a stress, so I suppressed "had"; but then I saw that "by" followed "rolled", so I suppressed "rolled" also, resulting in 3 syllables in a row with no emphasis. I just don't think this is a well-written line, not if the author was writing in meter. In an accentual poem, it would be acceptable.

However, my natural inclination is still to say it like this:

for HOURS / the CON /voys [slight pause] / had rolled BY

as if the pause were substituting for a syllable.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited September 20, 2001).]

Caleb, I find it close to impossible to read two consecutive syllables as having the same stress. In English, that is. To do that, you have to take on a robot voice for those three syllables. In the previous example, the "had" does not receive great stress. But greater than "voys". If we go with the linguistic petimeters, I'd say

convoys had rolled by = 4 1 2- 2+ 3

That is: Rising all the way. Someone else's reading might switch the + and the -. The key is that "had" can't be read with as little stress as "-voys". Just try doing it!

As for how well written the sentence is, the grammarians would insist that a preposition just ain't the right thing to end a sentence with.


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Svein Olav

.. another life

We don't all speak English with the same inflection and we don't all read or speak poetry equally well. When I was a kid in school and we had to memorize and recite poetry or read aloud, in any class there were far more inept readers than good ones, and I imagine those tin-eared kids became tin-eared adults.

Carol

End sentences with prepositions, Solan? Auden exploded that prohibition as Latinate nonsense decades ago. A story goes: The boy from Texas arrived at the Old Campus at Yale and asked an upperclassman, "'Scuse me, sir. Can you tell me where the library is at?" The New Englander snootily replied "At Yale, we don't end our sentences with prepositions." Texas replied "Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?"

Sigh. For the last time, Caleb, you cannot
scan that line that way or read it that way
without messing up the line, which is a fine
line. The accent, however light, is on
had, period. And there is no pause
after convoys, none---if there were
any pause at all, it would be a very slight
one after hours, but even that is
completely unnecessary. As Carol says, you
hear lines read in all kinds of ways, well
and badly. But of all the possible ways of
saying a line of well-made verse, only one
or two can be the right way. Sorry---strait
is the gate.

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/biggrin.gif

Good one, Tim. I think the prohibition against split infinitive is criticized for being nothing but an import from latin as well. I can't think of any good non Star Trek example, though.

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Svein Olav

.. another life