A few scattered comments. I think Frost was just
simplifying matters and meant merely that most
metrical poems are somewhere along what you might
call the iambic contiuum, from very strict iambic
(Pope) to pure accentual (Bridges' wonderful poem
"London Snow") He knew very well about the other
meters and occasionally wrote in them. Carol is
right in her reluctance to call those dimeter poems
accentual--in the Frost, for instance, there are
only two extra syllables and each opens the last line
of the quatrain. Very regular, I'd say.
Alicia, Ransom and others (including me) would call
the meter of that nursery rhyme dipodic (for the
uninitiated, a dipod is a foot with two accents;
usually one accent is strong and the other weak).
And I must confess that I have often wondered why
many poets and prosodists, including Alicia, are
bothered by applying the Greek terminology to verse
in English. One knows immediately that we have
accents where the ancients had quantities. I can
recognize the iambic in Latin and the iambic in
English and never have the sense of a misnomer.
(You can invent new names for English measures and
if they come into general use, fine, but until
then we are stuck with the classical names and I
don't see it as a big problem. The most obvious
difference is all in our favor: accentual-syllabic
is much more flexible than the quantitative meters
and capable of greater subtlety of expression. I
would hazard the claim that the invention of the
accentual-syllabic meters is one of the great
glories of Western civilization. It would be
good to know if Chaucer invented it by himself or,
more likely, a number of poets advanced together,
thinking to pair the syllabic Norman meter with
the accentual native meter.)
Finally, one small disagreement, Alicia. I think
the articles easily receive the metrical accent
and it happens more often than we might think.
By metrical accent, I mean only that the ear hears
the ghost of the accent where it expects to hear
one and is satisfied. I have a lot of examples in
a notebook I can't find at the moments, examples
from several centuries, so I'll compose a couple
of unexceptional lines that exhibit an accented
article:
I gathered an intrepid troop of soldiers
and
Seen from the hilltop, a beleaguered city
That second line is especially interesting because
in the third foot, though iambic, I'd insist, the
unaccented syllable has a longer vowel, much more
lexical force, in short, more stress than the article,
but the article gets the accent. I call it an in-
verted iamb, and you hear it all the time. Here are
two examples that come to mind:
Like stormclouds in a troubled sky
and
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
The second line is more ambiguous, perhaps---one
could plausibly read the second foot as trochaic,
though I wouldn't. Both lines are iambic, I feel,
and both have feet (the second in each case) in
which the preposition wrests, so to speak, the
metrical accent from the stronger first syllable.
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