[New-Poetry] Questions on form

[Jason Quackenbush]

I count "William," "different" as a three syllable words and "beautiful" 
and "Everyone" as four syllable words. so there are four lines in this 
that have eight syllables. which is what i mean by "shoehorning" which 
is what you have to do if you want to say that every line here is in 
regular 7 syllable units. and you have to do that if you want to use 
traditional bivalent scansion toaccount for what feels like the 
regularity in this.

TheOldMole wrote:
> I don't think so. It's very regular, whether you read it as all 
> trochees or a balance between iambs and trochees, you still have seven 
> syllables in every line, three metric feet of two sy;llables and one 
> of one.
>
> jfq at myuw.net wrote:
>> I think it's precisely these sorts of discussions that reveal the 
>> limitations of traditional bivalent scansion. Clearly there's a 
>> rhythmic scheme in this:
>>
>>
>>> _Earth_, /re_ceive_ /an _hon_/oured _guest_:
>>> _Will_iam/ _Yeats_/ is _laid _/to _rest_.
>>> _Let _the /_Ir_ish /_ves_sel /_lie_
>>> _Empt_ied /_of _its /_po_et/_ry_.
>>>
>>> _Time _/that _is _/in_tol_/er_ant_
>>> _Of _the /_brave _and /_in_no/_cent_,
>>> _And _in/_diff_erent/ _in _/a _week_
>>> _To _a/ _beaut_i/_ful _phy/_sique_,
>>>
>>> _Wor_ships/_ lang_uage/ _and _/for_gives_
>>> _Ev_/ery_one _/by _whom _/it _lives_;
>>> _Pard_ons /_cow_/ar_dice_, /con_ceit_,
>>> _Lays_/ its _hon_/ours _at _/their _feet_.
>>
>> but you try to shoehorn it into Greek feet, and the next thing you 
>> know you have to invent all sorts of weird schemata to "explain" 
>> something that's really very intuitive if you don't think to hard 
>> about it: there are two strong stresses coupled with two attendant 
>> weak stresses on each line (in the first line quoted above, the 
>> strong stresses are on "Earth" and "hon" and weak stresses on "ceive" 
>> and "guest") and the length of the line changes as needed due to the 
>> variable length of the syllables and the presence of caesura which 
>> would otherwise upset the pace of the pulse underlying the placement 
>> of the stresses.
>>
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>