[mandolin]

Wonderful to have you here! At breakfast at West Chester, I called you Tim, but I feel like I should say "Dr. Steele" --

I've got two questions related to other threads at Eratosphere, but I'll save the second for another thread. The first concerns the first line of Frost's "Death of the Hired Man": "Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table." Caleb Murdock said the line wasn't IP, and I gave a scansion which I wrongly claimed was regular IP: MAry | sat MUS | ing ON | the LAMP- | flame AT | the TABle. Initial trochee, feminine ending, and so far so good -- but, as Carol Taylor pointed out, 6 feet.

Other scansions have been suggested, all of which involve, ignoring the foot divisions, MUSing on the LAMP.

How would you scan the line? Is it preferable to understand the line as containing an extra foot or as containing multiple substitutions and three consecutive unstressed syllables?

More generally, is traditional scansion useful for a line like this one?