SUppilUliUmas! What a MARvelous NAME for a MONarch,
RUler of ROYal HattUsas, whom the THOUsand GODS of the HAtti
This how I read the opening name, which without its three accents would not be "a marvelous name".
Carol, I suppose I don't think of it as acc-syll because I never bother with counting syllables when I write them, which I do with all acc-sylls. I can't speak for Hope, but all I am doing when I write such lines is placing the high points of accent in a more or less dactyllic pattern. And that's it.
But I think Peter and Michael are right, that dac-hex is not the best medium for this discussion, so I would like to pick up the point from Jerry's thread, which was where this thread came from in the first place.
Here is the Larkin poem in question (also presently discussed on "Mastery")
Dublinesque
Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.
The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.
There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),
And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.
========
Jerry, you ask:
"What am I missing by not seeing these lines as dimeter?"
By which Jerry meant the long line in this poem.
Well, I would agree with Bob Mezey, who says that to miss the dimeter in the nine syllable line is to miss the writer's intention for reading the piece, and disrupting the flow of the entire poem.
I found another shorter line poem on a
"Mastery" thread that readers appeared to have problems with, so here it is:
The Listeners
by Walter De La Mare
'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:-
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.