[Chris Childers]

Mark's post is further evidence of why lines cannot be scanned out of context. His scansion is plausible until you get to the demotion of "singing," which is forced, and if it were Shelley's intent, would give cause to doubt either his skill-level or his patience. However, if we turn to the first stanza of the poem, we find:

HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert—
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

The first four lines are CLEARLY trimeter, and the line last hexameter. So here is a poem in which the old saw rings true: the meter is established at the beginning, and the reader, if he's going to honor the poet's intention, should stick to it. Further, it is obvious that the threes are meant to play off in some way against the six-beat fifth line. I'm sure much more can be said about this stanza form, but right now, I will not be the one to say it.

Chris

[Mark Allinson]

Whoops-a-daisy!

Yes, you are right, Chris.

Context is ALL.

[Brian Watson]

Mike has cited Frost's Reluctance as an example of feminine endings. Here is a less successful poem by the same poet:

The Last Mowing
There's a place called Far-away Meadow
We never shall mow again,
Or such is the talk at the farmhouse:
The meadow is now finished with men.
Then now is the chance for the flowers
That can't stand mowers and plowers.
It must be now, though, in season
Before the not mowing brings trees on,
Before trees, seeing the opening,
March into a shadowy claim.
The trees are all I'm afraid of,
The flowers can't bloom in the shade of;
It's no more men I'm afraid of;
The meadow is done with the tame.
The place for the moment is ours
For you, oh tumultuous flowers,
To go to waste and go wild in,
All shapes and colors of flowers,
I needn't call you by name.

Season/treason is one thing, but season/trees on sets my teeth on edge.

[Brian Watson]

Till the world is wrought

"It could be acephalous iamb, missing a syllable at the beginning, or it could be catalectic trochee, missing a syllable at the end. So which is it?

The question is unfair...

Not so much unfair as pedantic and pointless. Here is the line scanned as acephalous iambic trimeter:

Till the world is wrought

and here is the line scanned as catalectic trochaic trimeter:

Till the world is wrought

See if you can spot the difference.

One could happily go through life never hearing the terms acephalous iambic and catalectic trochaic and be none the worse for it. Some authors turn prosody into a game of semantics.

[Mike Todd]

Two more from Frost.

One Step Backward Taken

Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing
And the sun came out to dry me.

Each line ends with a feminine rhyme. This, coupled with short meter, unavoidable phonic foolery—add up the instances of alliteration and consonance in LL3-6; and check out the cheeky off-rhyme of gallons / balance—, and the wry, self-satisfied tone of the close, creates something altogether risible. Contrast this with the final stanza of Desert Places:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

As evinced by the poem's broken meter, the speaker is struggling to keep calm, to maintain control over his mind; and now in the final stanza, feminine endings come in, replacing what were masculine endings: one gets the sense that the speaker is losing his last psychological foothold. Only a final spondee and two plosives suggest some remaining resolve.