> How, by the way, would you scan this line from Lear? "Break, break, break,
> break, break!"
I suspect this conflates three things:
"Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones" from Lear -- a great line
which is slightly irregular metrically, since the first syllable of the
second iamb is stressed -- in blank verse the beat is almost always
regularized by keeping at least the second and fifth feet regular iambs
(though with an added weak syllable freely allowed after the latter.)
In the same scene Lear's "Never, never, never, never, never!" another great
and really audacious line -- could any of us get away with something like
that? -- audacious partly exactly because it's quite regular metrically (if
you grant the allowable truncation of the first syllable of the first iamb.)
Byron's "Break break break ..."
Obscure joke: What is a "lowered barn?" The name of a great English poet
in Texan.
Misquote of my own:
"The mountains look on Marathon
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that beer might yet be free ... "
(I do think though that prosodic analysis can be a good descriptive servant
but makes a poor prescriptive master. It's as useful, and as useless, as
talking about Coltrane's chromaticism.)
--
===================================
Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
===================================
