Thread: Hardy
View Single Post
  #4  
Unread 08-07-2001, 12:38 PM
robert mezey robert mezey is offline
Master of Memory
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Claremont CA USA
Posts: 570
Post

It's not exactly iambic or anapestic,
but a mixture. Four-beat lines, what Frost
would have called loose iambic. Once you
hear the measure (which should be about at
the end of line 1), you hear it easily all
the way through. "Sees" in line 10 should
cause no problem at all---for Hardy, that's
a normal anapest. (You'd make things easier
for yourself, Caleb, if you didn't break all
the lines down into feet. Hardy, like any
other poet, is not composing in feet, but in
lines, and he knows, and expects the reader
to know when the meter has been fulfilled in
every line.) If you want to see Hardy doing
amazing things with anapests, read "The Missed
Train" (and, if you have the book, the brief
metrical analysis in the Introduction, p. xxix,
beginning, "Ransom said that no poet understood
the function of meter better than Hardy and had
the highest praise for the sureness and delicacy
of his ear and his fresh way with the meters").

Reply With Quote