Alan, a good question. My experience has been
that students have a hard time with using numbers
for scansion. What works best, I think, is the
notation I learned from Ransom, who took it from
George Stewart's very useful book and made some
changes for the classroom. The trouble is that
it's not easy, at least for me, to use in this
format. (Computers make some things much harder
and not easier.) Anyway, an iambic foot is
marked o S, but if the unaccented syllable is
as strongly stressed as the second syllable, or
almost, you would mark it O S---the O signifying
that it doesn't get a metrical accent but rivals
the accented syllable in duration, intensity,
pitch or whatever. And just so, in the case of
a very light accented syllable, you would mark
it o s. So that the Frost line would be scanned:
o S o o S O S o o s o S
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground
(and I'll do it another way in case those marks
get moved) (---as they were)
.o.....S.....o....o....S......O.......S....o..o... s...o....S
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground
As you can see, it's very simple. Of course, it
is still crude, as all systems are, but to my mind
less so than any of the others. And I keep the
terminology very simple too---no tribrachs or
amphimacers &c &c (which are classical feet in
any case and are never used in English verse,
except perhaps to describe phrasing, and they're
too clunky and unfamiliar to be of much use that
way). I think you can get along very well with
iamb, trochee, and the double foot,
the ionic. I suppose spondee (and
anapest) are useful terms. (I'd argue
that there's no such thing as a pyrrhic in
English verse.)
ps--I had to edit that line three times to get the
notation situated correctly over the syllables, so
unless there's some trick I'm ignorant of, it does
not work very well in this format. But you can
always use it by itself. For example, to indicate
the scansion of
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him
you'd follow the lines with
O/So/Sos/SooS
oSoSoSo/SoS(o)
--is that clear?
[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 09, 2001).]
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