On the metrical board that I moderate, fug posted a poem whose final stanza goes:
We care no more nor mourn,
our ash-clothes are our dress-suits;
we dance to notes from death-flutes;
our tumbled gods reborn.
A pattern of feminine rhyme was sustained in lines 2&3 of quatrains throughout the poem. One respondant complained of a metrical shift in the final stanza. I disputed this point, saying that the last syllables of those lines dropped stress in comparison with the preceeding ones. In such instances I find Steele's four-level scansion helpful to explain subtleties of rhythm that binary scansion cannot adequately convey. We scan a pattern of relative stress.
Alan Sullivan
No, these are all trimeters, though I'd probably call the b-rhymes "double" rather than "feminine." In the latter a stressed syllable rhymes with another stressed syllable; both are followed by an indentical unstressed syllable. Rhymes like these put equal stress (more or less) on both syllables.
As I've said, I personally don't care for four-level (or five or six) scansion methods. I'll admit that stress is relative and that some stresses are not stressed as much as other stresses, but it stresses me out to have to assign relative stress-levels to them. I have students scan and do scansions for them, but I have never scanned a line of my own verse as part of the practice of composing it. Or maybe I did, once, when I tried to write hendecasyllabics.
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