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Unread 06-30-2005, 01:57 PM
Len Krisak Len Krisak is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2000
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I liked this sonnet very much (obviously).

To try my hand one more time at pedantry, though:

"memory" pronounced "mem ' ry" would not technically be a case of elision, which is ordinarily thought to require two short vowels collapsed to one syllable. The classic example is Shakespeare's "the expense of spirit" 's becoming "thex pense," if you follow. A case like memory's or, say, turning a word like "threatening" (3 syllables) into 2 ("thret ' ning") is an example of syncopation, or syncope' . Stephen Booth's edition of Shakespeare's sonnets has some excellent notes on this practice in many of the sonnets.

Sorry to be such a fussbudget !
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