Interesting thread. "inverted iamb" is I think a valid metrical idea -- & Steele discusses it (in "All's the Fun"), not using that name, in terms of compound words crossing metrical foot boundaries, as I recall, so it's not like Mezey was making it up. Mezey's example:
Like stormclouds in a troubled sky
has a compound word crossing between the 1st & 2nd feet. Disyllabic compounds are idiomatically stressed on the first syllable, forcing the second syllable into an unstressed position, hence the "inverted iamb" in the 2nd foot. Compare:
Like dark clouds in a troubled sky.
Adjective-noun combinations do not have the idiomatic stress pattern of compounds (& that is precisely how compounds are differentiated, verbally, from adjective-noun combinations), & so the 2nd foot here is a trochee.
As Mezey says, it's the distinction between "stress" and "accent" or however you want to put it that confuses people -- because, while they usually more or less coincide, they don't always, & then it's hard to explain what exactly the difference is. An obvious application of the distinction is to the question of whether or not there is such a thing as a spondee in English poetry -- as came up recently in Albert Geiser's thread in DE. Here's an IP line from Shakespeare:
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Certainly the 3 syllables "age, ache, pen" receive equally strong speech stress. It would not make much sense to "save the iamb" in the second foot by claiming that "ache" is stressed ever so slightly less than "pen." So you have a choice: either treat the second foot as a spondee, or differentiate between speech stress & metrical accent. Either there are 6 accents in this pentameter line, or the second foot is an iamb, not a spondee, in that it falls into the iambic rhythm of the line.
Metrical theory seems simple at first but it can get very subtle very quickly, & Mezey was wonderful with the subtleties. He knew what he was talking about. I think he's sworn off Eratosphere, though, because of some political thread some time ago -- too bad!
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