Those are much better examples, Mark. The Larkin is accentual dimeter and the de la Mare is accentual trimeter, long lines and all. If it seems clumsy to many ears that's because it is difficult to establish a rhythm in the absence of a pattern. I wouldn't go out of my way to write accentual meter; it must have taken a great deal of determination on de la Mare's part to avoid the obvious and go for the awkward and verbose:
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
instead of
Echoed through the still house's shadows
or the redundancy and strange usage of the verb in:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
when he could have said:
And he smote the door for a second time
and as long as he was going to such extremes to avoid accentual-syllabic meter, why the abbreviated 'neath?, which almost surely was invented by poets to comply with the demands of accentual-syllabic meter?
I keep thinking I've read this poem in Spanish, but maybe I'm mixing it up with something else. It's not a translation, is it? That would explain some of the choices.
Carol
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