Clive,
I don't myself hear any breakdown of metrical regularity, though I don't mind a reader's taking the 3rd line of that
stanza as short a foot---it still sounds ok to me (though,
as I say, I hear "smile" as at least a syllable-and-a-half).
The first line has a trochee in the middle of the line, but
after a brief caesura---nothing very daring there. As for
line 4, it opens with an ionic, a common substitution, but
I don't think it ends with one---the fourth foot is what I
call an inverted iamb, the first syllable heavier than the
second but not enough to get the accent: because of the
falling rhythm of "DANCE tune," I hear a slight accent on
afticle. Thus:
Of the OLD-FANGled DANCE tunes AND each PAIR
I can't at all hear it the way you scanned it. And I'd
say that whole stanza, in fact the whole poem, is regular pentameter except perhaps for that "smile" business. (And
that's an anomaly---normally, I wouldn't permit that sort
of monkey-business.)
The most interesting line, to my ear, is
And some then dance off in the late sunlight
where the meter and speech rhythm dance a comlicated few
steps together. The middle foot is rather ambiguous.
And I like the way the rhetoric in line 10 enforces a
trochee not right after the caesura, but in the next foot.
SOME of them SINGle, SOME HUSbands and WIVES
say the stanza is quite regular except for that "smile"
business.
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