Hi, Roger--
I have precious little appetite for street brawls over trivia, and would never have commented on your metrics here had you not explicitly made exaggerated claims for your ditty at Jim's expense. Though your remarks on his metrical failures may well have been warranted, I sensed more than a bit of pot and kettle.
I too sometimes "stretch" natural readings to maintain dactylic cadence, relying on the momentum of the rhythm to span the chasm:
Fatal astronomy!
Nicholas Romanov,
last on the throne of the
great Russian czars,
must have been blind to the
incontrovertible
family fate written
red in the stars.
(I trust the reader to play along and indulge the attempt to avoid stresses on "Russian" and "written" here. Even so, this d-d is not entirely successful rhythmically.)
But there are stretches and there are stretches, and in this case your additional rhyme on "deceive/believe" ironically calls even more attention to those words, working against your wish to downplay the stresses on their final syllables. "YOU tell it TO believe" (natural iambic) is begging as huge an indulgence as "CRYing in THE kitchen" (natural trochaic), especially since in context the stress you want on "YOU" is dramatically and rhetorically highly suspect.
Yes, your "Ponder our progeny" works metrically and in other regards (though your waiving the "required" d-d word in l. 6 makes your triumph less than complete). My compliments on it, but that wasn't the issue here.
Cheers,
Jan
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