Jeffrey:
I'll try to get round to addressing your and Martin's other questions and
objections anon, but for now:
> What "norm" could Auden have been following (I genuinely don't known,
> Robin)?
I really don't know either. It +seems+ to me that it's a case (as often in
the post-1940s Auden) where he's using a classical metric. Hexameters? But
I'm pretty blank in this area.
It seems to be hovering around a 14/12 syllable couplet. (Though this seems
also to stretch to thirteen in the first line and sometimes as far as ten in
the second. That sort of syllable-variation-from-a-notional-norm pointing
to classical metrics, where a three-syllable dactyl can be substituted by a
two-syllable spondee.) Perhaps the classicists among us
could put a name to this?
[For all of me, unless poets are deliberately attempting to imitate
classical metres, English poetry can happily be analysed in terms of
iambic/trochaic/anapestic/dactylic, with the lesser ionic ascending foot
chucked in as a bugger-factor to cover those rare occasions where a spondee
manages to shove its head above the logic of stress-contrast.]
Most of the lines also seem to have a strong (but varyingly-placed) pause.
But this may simply be the (inevitable0 consequence of the line-length.
Whatever else it is, I don't think it's any variety of syllable-accent
metre, so if Auden has in his head some sort of qualitative norm (that
chimera which has haunted English poetry ever since Sidney, and eluded
everyone other than Clough) a search for a stress-based pattern would be
fruitless anyway.
Sorry this is so blurred -- I'll try and get back to this, together with the
lines at issue in this context, and the other points raised both
frontchannel and back.
(It was backchanneled to me that Senator Joe didn't get involved in HUAC
till after 1948, so bang goes my punch-line anyway.)
I still think, even if my answer is wrong, that there's +something+ serious
at issue over the revision.
Robin
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