[Bill Carpenter]

Great questions. Open Paradise Lost anywhere and see all kinds of substitutions, though his anapests like yours can usually be read as elisions (an r, an l, or nothing between two vowels).

I think a reversed fourth foot can be fine. Like connecting with a slow pitch. It isolates and emphasizes the last stress.

[Jayne Osborn]

Hi Tony,

Still, I do feel that there are gaps in my education, gap so wide "even two can pass abreast" as it might be.

Make that "four abreast", then, in my case! Pyrrhics, anapests, trochees, catalexis, promoted, demoted, substitutions, headless... complex stuff, this poetry!

I'm intrigued by Maryann's question:
On the larger question--what were you taught about where substitutions are permitted?--very anciently, I was taught that in pentameter, trochaic substitutions are permitted in the first and third feet only.

Taught it to that level? Where? At school? University? I've never been taught anything along these lines but, like you, 'I taught myself from books', and still have to double-check some of the more obscure poetic devices.
(You sound knowledgeable enough about it all, to me, Tony! )

[Maryann Corbett]

Originally Posted by Jayne Osborn

I'm intrigued by Maryann's question:
On the larger question--what were you taught about where substitutions are permitted?--very anciently, I was taught that in pentameter, trochaic substitutions are permitted in the first and third feet only.

Taught it to that level? Where? At school? University?

University, Jayne. I'm recalling a book, one that was a "recommended text" rather than the main text, and mainly a reference, in an honors literature survey. Darn if I can remember which book. Not much help; sorry.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Tony, send me an email and I'll send the list.

Sam

[Jayne Osborn]

Thanks, Maryann.
It's OK, I have lots of reference books, but with the benefit of hindsight I'd have taken a different study course.
Too late now; I'm done with studying (in the formal sense). I just read those reference books if, and when, I feel like it, these days!

[Heidi Czerwiec]

At this point in the conversation, I don't have much to add to what's been said above, but I very much liked what Maryann said about the metrical line versus the conversational -- it makes me remember an exercise Tom Kirby-Smith had us do scanning Frost according to how the metrical line sounded, then rescanning the same poem according to how Frost read it in a recording -- the two were surprisingly different.

And like one of the other commentators (Sam?) I will purposefully clunk up the line with substitutions to convey feeling or awkwardness, etc. My polestar in this is Shakespeare's "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame".