There's a little confusion on the dipodic meters.
Maybe Ransom did hear "Neutral Tones" that way,
but I'm very surprised---his ear always seemed
flawless. He spent quite a lot of time on dipods
(maybe the only prof in the country who did). Yes,
Lew Turco is wrong, and so too is Miller Williams,
though they're both very knowledgeable. Let me
try to explain dipods briefly. They're most common
in the long lines, fourteeners or trochaic octameters
("A Toccata of Galuppi's"), but can be found in short
lines too. In the line you quote, Alicia, I'd say
that that's not so much a run of unaccented syllables
as part of the foot, which consists of two accents,
one strong, one weak. E.g.
BAH Bah BLACK Sheep
HAVE you An-y WOOL
YES Sir YES Sir
THREE Bags FULL
(I've put an initial capital on the weaker of the
accented syllables; the strong accents are all caps.)
The KING is In the COUNTing House
COUNTING Out his MONey
The QUEEN is In the PAR-Lor
EATing Bread and HON-ey
Interestingly, the weak accent may fall on a syllable
that gets hardly any speech stress and skip over a
more important syllable. Frost has a wonderful dipodic
poem called "The Leaf Treader"---the last stanza (about the leaves) begins:
They SPOKE to the Fug-itive IN my Heart as IF it were
Leaf to LEAF
They TAPPED at my Eye-lids and TOUCHED my Lips with an
IN-vi-Ta-tion to GRIEF
I hope the alternation of strong/weak syllables is
clear there. One effect I especially like is where
the dipodic movement is ambiguous, as in Hardy's
"Wessex Heights" in which some lines sound like
heptameters and others fall readily into dipodic.
Enough. Sorry to be pedantic about all this.
|