Mr. M, thanks for posting that poem. Though I love Frost, this isn’t a poem I had ever paused long enough to notice and appreciate. It’s quite wonderful, though baffling to me in terms of its metrics. As I go through it, there are several lines I don’t really know how to scan though I think I know how to say them. It also strikes me (perhaps incorrectly) that Frost is using ionic figures quite a bit (pyhrric-spondee pairs, if you will), which give a sort of anapestic flavor but are not the same as anapests.
I offer some comments on some of the lines that most confused me. I acknowledge in advance that I likely missed the mark quite a bit, but I’m hopeful that I’ll learn something when I am corrected.
And MADE DUST and dropped STOVE-length STICKS of WOOD
We were discusing on the “loose iambics” thread the use of trochaic substitutions without a caesura to set it up. Here it seems we have another example in the second foot.
Perhaps the rhythm/meter tension here is the way “dropped” and “length” end up not taking a metrical beat even though they are strong words that claim a fair amount of emphasis in ordinary speech (one syllable words of six and seven letters).
SWEET-scented STUFF when the BREEZE drew aCROSS it.
My scansion yields only four beats. But perhaps I should be giving “drew” a beat as well, with “when the breeze drew” as an ionic?
And the SAW SNARLED and RATTled, SNARLED and RATTled
anapest-trochee-trochee-trochee-trochee? Or ionic-iamb-iamb-iamb (plus hypermetric tag)?
To PLEASE the BOY by GIVing him the HALF HOUR
I give up. I wish someone would comment here to let me know what’s happening.
That a BOY COUNTS so MUCH when SAVED from WORK.
The line starts with an ionic, then switches to iambs?
Leaped OUT at the BOY’S HAND, or SEEMED to LEAP–
iamb-ionic-iamb-iamb?
As he SWUNG TOWARD them HOLDing UP the HAND
Pronouncing “toward” as one-syllable, as I believe the line demands, we end up with an ionic to start the line.
So. But the hand was gone already.
I take it that this is the line that is deliberately not pentameter. The missing hand is registered in the missing foot. (Sorry). The next two lines turn into smoothly regular IP, as if to switch to a different plane. We are now seeing things through the doctor’s eyes, not the boy’s. The boy has left us now, dead a line or two before his death is explicitly reported.
LITTle–LESS–NOTHing!--and THAT ENDed it.
I don’t know how to describe this line. The line ending is particularly strange.
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