Tony, I hope you won't mind if the meter-theory addicts, having been aroused, keep rumbling on in your thread even though you retire from it.
The main thing I notice about the difference between Bill's scansion and Clive's is that Clive calls nothing a spondee. I'm another one who has a very truncated faith in the reality of spondees. I favor the Timothy Steele four-level system of stresses, in which two very heavy syllables next to each other can usually be contrasted as lighter and heavier, a 3 and a 4 (as in sat'st brood [ing], so that they still make a normal iamb.
The only spondees I think I believe in are those in double iambs:
to a |green thought| in a | green shade
and even there, pitch is slightly higher for thought and shade.
We really ought to do some comparing of scansions and Audacity files.
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