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Unread 10-04-2002, 02:02 AM
A. E. Stallings A. E. Stallings is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Athens, Greece
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Well, I think one perhaps COULD read "Neutral Tones" with a a sort of two-major-beat swing to the tetrameter lines--"stood"/"winter"; "sun"/"chidden"; "few"/"starving" (and very interesting word pairs too, going through the poem). I'd agree, though, that it is a stretch to call the poem dipodic.

That the effect works best with a longer line makes sense to me--otherwise the line tends to want to break up into two shorter lines. (Maybe it is just a matter of the length of the human breath.)

For those listening in who may be a bit confused about what we are talking about, these are lines that can, in effect, be scanned two different ways--and perhaps both are working at once. (It's a LITTLE writing the same tune in both 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures...) It tends to happen in seven- and eight-beat lines, which then tend to telescope into four strong beats. It's a wonderful rhythmic effect. Another favorite of mine is Housman's "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?" (modelled after Kipling's "Danny Deever"). You CAN scan it as perfect iambs, but the pressure of the long line, along with the fact that many of the stressed syllables are rather promoted ("that" "with" "on") and can easily slip from the foreground, produces this effect

oh WHO is that young SIN ner with the HAND cuffs on his WRISTS

(These meters ARE cases where you regularly get three relatively "unstressed" syllables in a row, even though individual syllables may receive word-stress)

It feels like a folksy, ballad-y meter to me, and does show up a fair bit in Country music.

One example I like to give is "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"...

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