Quoting myself (to Annie):
> To be honest, it never occurred to me to read Auden's poem as anything
other
> than basically anapestic, and it still wouldn't. Or alternatively, as
> four-stress verse. Either description works.
I think I'll rephrase that. There's a certain area of English verse where
poems can be scanned in two distinct ways. In the case of Auden's "O where
are you going?", if it's scanned in terms of syllable-accent metre, it comes
out as mostly anapestic, but I suspect in this case (both from the poem
itself and the context in Auden's work) that what we have is a stress metre
poem.
In one sense, it doesn't really matter, as it comes out the mouth the same
whichever mode of scansion you adopt.
(For a lulu of a conundrum, have a look at Wyatt's sonnet, "Farewell, Love,
and all thy laws forever". In the Egerton MS, it's thirteen lines of
iambpent with one awkward intrusive line, but in the earlier version, found
in the Devonshire MS, "Now farewell Love and thy laws forever", it's roughly
50/50 iambic pentameter lines and four-stress lines. Difficult to know
quite what to do with something like that.)
Robin
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