Thank you for your explanation, Bob. I think you have helped me wrap my mind around it. It will still be some time before I can succesfully wrap my ear around it as well, and actually be able to produce an inverted iamb in a poem (except by accidentally believing I have committed a trochaic substitution).
I can almost grasp it at
The new day, and the shape of his own hand
and
To fleeting forms, a bonfire, a tornado
I had some more trouble with
And offer to me gently out of my pain
but I'll leave that job to - as you say - time and reflection.
I ask such theoretical questions because they help me read. I read all of Dante's Inferno without hearing a single iamb - simply because I wasn't looking for any. I would probably have discovered them had I read it aloud. But I didn't.
I have a very good ear for metric rhythm in song - despite being tone deaf - but I think meter in written language eluded me for a long time simply because writing means visual; you can't see an iamb. So much to catch up.
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Svein Olav
.. another life
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