There's no way of answering those questions about those "Synopsis" lines--the meter is too awkward and irregular to
know where the accents are supposed to go in each line.
As for the other matter, I don't know how many times it must
be said, but YES, the meter does affect the pronunciation to
some extent and it MUST be heard--at some level. Since the
line is a pentameter, the ear must hear an accent on the penultimate syllable of "Illimitable." But the ear needs
merely to be satisfied and the accent need be barely audible.
In my notation,
The desert and illimitable air o S o s o S o s o S
Reading or saying the line aloud, there are only three syllables that are cleearly stressed--but there are five accents, as there must be, and in this line they fall just
where they are expected. These are really elementary matters. A wonderful example of a line with only three
strong stresses is the next-to-last line of "A Silken Tent"
in which the gust Frost is speaking of is enacted by the
meter and the consonant sounds:
In the capriciousness of summer air s o o S o s o S o S
The last three lines of the poem are full of such drama of
sound and word order:
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
And the poem dramatizes that slight bondage with that inversion in the last line, the only clear inversion in the
poem. Frost could have written the line another way without
the inversion (he could do anything he wanted, he had that kind of mastery) but he wanted the inversion, which is the verbal result of the verbal gust.
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