Thread: Alicia, Welcome
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Unread 08-30-2002, 02:19 AM
A. E. Stallings A. E. Stallings is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Athens, Greece
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Curtis, I may well be wrong on this, but actually I find the "Petition" fairly regular IP, though it pushes the envelope in a couple of lines. I don't think I would go so far as to call it accentual.

A few lines (as the penultimate) start on initial trochees. Some have slight syllables promoted, as a case of Mezey's article promotion:

Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response.

What confuses, I think, is that right away, the second line appears to be hypermetric. I can still read it as a pentameter, though it could well just be a hexameter thrown in the mix--an old "acceptable substitution" in ip. It of course makes sense that this line is hypermetric--it is itself prodigal--a spendthrift of syllables:

But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:

The only other "problem" line in regular IP would be this:

The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,

And I think here he may be eking out four-syllables from "exhaustion"

Aside from those two slightly problematic lines, this seems like fairly straightforward IP to me, with only occasional extra syllables. (And I am not a syllable counter, myself.)
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