Quote:
Originally posted by Hugh Clary:
Hey, if Wendy Cope can bend the rules, so can the rest of us! (note line 4)
Emily Dickinson
Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.
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Of course we can bend, or break, or even smash to smithereens, the rules--and I say: Full steam ahead! The question is one of (relative) effectiveness, though, and my ear likes the punch of the sudden rhyme leaping from the normative dactyls.
P.S.: Cope's example isn't really a metrical exception at all, but simply a matter of conventional (printed) appearance. The "founding fathers" established the "legitimacy" of hyphenating words at the ends of lines to preserve the (metrical) form, and the cited lines
sound, and for H and H would have been written:
Liked to use dashes in-
Stead of full stops.
Yep, they even capitalized the second syllable of the hyphenated word. All a matter of which conventions one accepts, I suppose.
Cheers,
Jan