I thought of a way of showing the difference between rhythm and meter, and I'll try it out in a day or so when I have a spare hour. But I vehemently disagree that meter and rhythm are usually the same--if that were so, most metrical verse would sound much too doggedly regular and boring. (There are
exceptions: Tichbourne's poem, a miracle of metrical and rhetorical and repetitious regularity.) The meter and the speech rhythm are always dancing and simultaneously dueling ---what I mean is, each is usually pulling in a much or slightly different direction: sometimes the meter enforces its will and sometime the speech rhythm enforces its will, but there is rarely peaceful agreement, or not for long. That's
what Frost meant by bending sentences over the frame of the meter, that's the strain, and that results, as he says, not in the meter or in the sentence rhythm but in a third sound made of the tension between the two. That is the brilliance and
subtlety and expressiveness of accentual-syllabic verse (to my mind an invention even greater than the wheel).
By the way, don't you think Yeats was a lousy reader, those of you who have heard the few things recorded? It takes a kind of genius to mess up as good a poem as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
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