no, not a fixed value, but a meaning or connotation relative to the
other lines in the same or contrasting meters within the same
free-verse poem. (Or others by the same poet, or sometimes others by
poets who seem to use metrical phrases in similar ways and in response
to similar literary/historical forces.) But even if the context is
large, there is nothing "fixed" about the meaning, and meaning is not
value.
>> t. It's a matter of seeing patterns in poems written over hundreds
>> of years, so that a particular line is the just a tip of a glacier..
>> Isn't reading any kind of pattern into a poem is to some extent a
>> matter of prejudice?
>
> There's a difference between discovering and reading into. You go the
> next step and assign a fixed value to some of what you read in.
>
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