I have some disagreements with Tim Steele on the matter of metrical promotion. Which is to say that I find the pyrrhic and spondaic feet useful in scansion. Having said that, I should add that for me scansion is only a very inadequate way of visually rendering what is purely auditory. I scan with only two marks, stressed and unstressed, and while I admit that some stresses are stronger than others I find methods that employ up to four levels of stress too subjective. In other words, you pays your money and you takes your choice. If I scan a typical line of Shakespeare, here's what I come up with:
u / u / u u u / u /
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
"The ex" is elided into a single syllable. Tim would probably argue that "in" is promoted because of its central position between unstressed syllables and because an accent is "expected" there. But I don't hear it. To my ear "in" is a low on the scale as "-it" and "a."
In lines by Robinson, the opposite occurs:
And bowered as few may be, their joy recalls
/ / / / u / u / u /
No snake, no sword, and over them there falls
I hear both "no"'s as roughly equal to the nouns that follow and will admit that "them," while not particularly strong is closer to a stress than an unstressed syllable.
My "rules," such as they are, are very simple:
Any word of two syllables or more will have at least one stressed syllable. Compounds like "bedroom" or "sideways," while the stress "hovers" over both syllables, will generally have one syllable (the first in both cases here) that is stronger. Thus, you can't rhyme "bedroom" with "gloom" effectively; you'd have to use a double rhyme like "headroom." Promotion does occur in words of three syllables or longer, especially at the ends of lines. It's common to use, say, "memory" as a full three syllable word with stresses on the first and third syllables so that it rhymes with "sea." In the middle of the line, however, the poet has the option of contracting (syncope) words like this into two syllables (mem'ry).
Unimportant one-syllable words like articles, conjunctions, and prepositions rarely are stressed, regardless of position. If one wishes them to be stressed they must either be italicized ("You're not theAlan Sullivan from Fargo?") or they must be placed in a position where stress is absolutely required (a rhyming position usually).
The message came to Tarzan from
The beating of a distant drum.
One-syllable words like descriptive adjectives ("red" "cold"), intensifiers ("too" "not"), and demonstratives ("this" "these") are in a gray area. I would generally stress the adjectives and would consider the others toss-ups. I feel that there's a rhetorical emphasis on "No snake, no sword" in the Robinson quote above, so I give the "no"'s stresses. But I wouldn't fight over the question.
Of course, these rules apply primarily to the double meters, iambic and trochaic. In triple meters, anapestic and dactylic, the rules are slightly different.
The metaphors that multiply at will.
Here both the first and third syllables of "metaphors" and "multiply" get a stress because of the iambic metrical base.
Metaphors multiply willfully
In the dactylic line, only the first syllables of these words get a true stress. In general, in double meters we tend to be stress-heavy; a line of iambic pentameter often has more than five stressed syllables (though sometimes as few as three). Triple meters tend to be stress-light; words (particularly single-syllable words) that would tend toward stress in an iambic line are skipped over, possibly an effect of the "quickness" of the triple meter.
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