Like Rose and other posters to this thread, I have occasionally found myself wondering if those for whom particular examples of word-order seem odd have a rather narrow sense of the rich and expressive possibilities of normal syntax.
Rose makes another good point when she remarks that “Inversions in which whole phrases are rearranged seem much less jarring to me than those in which two adjacent words are swapped.”
On the other hand, the line she quotes from Yeats is, I think, not an instance of inversion at all, but of ellipsis, something very common in Yeats; for surely the “normal” phrasing here would have been this: “Upon the brimming water among the stones there are nine and fifty swans". I take it that the fact that the sentence begins with two adverbial phrases of place does not constitute an inversion (i.e. should not be remarked on as “odd”): it is merely a case of simple periodic syntax.
Clive Watkins
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