^{Note 1 in page 177} “The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction,” PMLA, lxxiv (Dec. 1959), 585–598.

^{Note 2 in page 177} See “Lexis and Melos,” Sound and Poetry: English Institute Essays, 1956 (New York, 1957), pp. ix–xxvii; and Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 251–255.

^{Note 3 in page 177} For a comparable denial of anapestic, dactylic, and trochaic meters, see Henry L. Smith, Jr., “Toward Redefining English Prosody,” Studies in Linguistics, xiv: 3–4, 68–76. The central argument in this essay by the prominent linguistic theorist—an argument with which the present essay takes issue—is that “all of English ‘metered’ verse is predominately iambic, with always the possibility of some trochees alternating with the iambs.” Smith does not, of course, include non-syllable-counting strong-stress verse under the term “metered.”

^{Note 4 in page 178} Both authors do qualify this definition, but in failing to make their qualifications part of the definition itself, they render them ineffective. Abrams, for example, observes that “It is possible to distinguish many degrees of stress in English speech,” but immediately cancels this out by adding: “the most common and generally useful fashion of analyzing and classifying English meters is to distinguish only two categories of stress in syllables—‘stressed’ and ‘unstressed‘—and to group syllables into metric feet according to the patterning of these accents.” (Glossary, New York, 1957, p. 50).

^{Note 5 in page 178} An Outline of English Structure (Norman, Okla., 1951), pp. 36 ff. “Phonemic stress” is itself, of course, a relative, not absolute concept, since it describes only stress differences which reveal semantic distinctions. When a person shouts, for example, all syllables may be louder than when he whispers; but while he is either shouting or whispering, his syllables will, according to the phonemic theory, necessarily relate to one another in terms of this four-level classification.

^{Note 6 in page 179} It was just such a misconception of the iamb that led John Addington Symonds, in his Blank Verse (London, 1895, p. 70), to dispose of the metrical notion of iambic pentameter as virtually meaningless when applied to the great blank-verse writers, and to settle for a description based “more upon proportion and harmony of sounds than upon recurrences and regularities of structure.”

^{Note 7 in page 179} I am aware that, according to the structural linguists, this kind of metrical stress-heightening is explainable not in terms of phonemic stress (since no actual semantic distinctions are involved), but rather in terms of “allophones” (i.e., variant forms of stress phonemes which are conditioned by factors other than semantic ones). (See Smith, p. 68.) Hence the notation I offer below of Student B's reading is not really precise, since it gives the word “with” tertiary phonemic stress, rather than weak phonemic stress with a louder allo-phone than “And.” But I have tried to avoid encumbering my discussion with all the elaborate notational symbols necessary to provide an accurate linguistic description. The four levels of phonemic stress are introduced here, with their notations, only as a convenient means of establishing a phonetic point; and that phonetic point is itself only a means toward establishing a view of metrics which will not finally require any knowledge of linguistic theory to be understood.

^{Note 8 in page 179} As Wimsatt and Beardsley point out, the concept of relative stress is by no means a recent discovery. It has been

recognized by various traditional prosodists since at least Joseph Mayor. (See Chapters on English Metre, London, 1886, in which Mayor included observations on relative stress first made in the middle 1870's.)

^{Note 9 in page 180} Whitehall, “From Linguistics to Criticism,” and Chatman, “Robert Frost's ‘Mowing’: An Inquiry into Prosodic Structure,” Kenyon Review, Summer 1956, pp. 411–438.

^{Note 10 in page 180} Unlike these “temporal” prosodists, however, I consider the lengthening or shortening of syllables only an occasional device, rather than a constant structural element designed to create equal time lapses from foot to foot. As will be seen later, such an “isochronic” principle I associate only with strong-stress meter.

^{Note 11 in page 180} For an interesting discussion of the importance of pitch-differentiation in discriminating between syllables when their stress values are equal or nearly equal, see James W. Bright, “Proper Names in English Verse,” PMLA, n.s. vii: 3 (1889), pp. 347–368. In Bright's words, “ictus in conflict requires a pitch-accent.”

^{Note 12 in page 180} See John Hollander, “The Music of Poetry,” JAAC, xv (1956), pp. 232–244; Chatman, “Comparing Metrical Styles,” Style in Language (New York, 1960); and, for an early and unjustly neglected full-length exposition of this problem, Mark H. Liddell, An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry (New York, 1902).

^{Note 13 in page 180} Needless to say, I hold no special brief for these particular terms. Any abstract terms which express a relationship between the more and less prominent would do as well. I have avoided the terms “primary” and “secondary” only because they are likely to be confused with primary and secondary stress.

^{Note 14 in page 181} See for example, Arnold Stein's analysis of Donne's lines “Makes mee her Medall, and makes her love mee” and “So, if I dreame I have you, I have you” (Elegy X) in “Donne's Prosody,” KR, Summer 1956, pp. 439–443. In these lines, of course, the metrical ambiguities are inseparable from substantive ambiguities, as they usually are in Donne and elsewhere.

^{Note 15 in page 181} A vivid illustration of this is Dylan Thomas' recorded reading of his poem “Fern Hill,” in which nearly every strong stress is reinforced by a lengthening of syllable duration and a distinct contrast in pitch with the surrounding weakly stressed syllables. But the metrically indispensable factor is still stress.

^{Note 16 in page 181} KR, Summer 1956, pp. 418–421.

^{Note 17 in page 182} I am at a loss to understand why Wimsatt and Beardsley consider the “most plausible” reading of this line one in which the first, fourth, and sixth nouns receive the heaviest stress, and the second, third, and fifth nouns receive less heavy stress. As long as all the nouns are not treated as equal, the most plausible reading ought to honor the essential iambic rhythm, asserted not only by the rest of the poem, but also, in this line, by the pointed internal rhyme of “fens” and “dens.”

^{Note 18 in page 182} So, it might be added, is the so-called “double ionic foot,” or a four-syllable foot in which two opening light syllables are compensated for by two succeeding heavy stresses —a type of “irregularity” which John Crowe Ransom (“The Strange Music of English Verse,” KR, Summer 1956, pp. 460–477) finds quite common in traditional iambic poetry. I would suppose that Ransom would apply the term to the phrase “And with old woes” in Shakespeare's line. But in so doing, he would fail to allow for the iambic character of the second foot, and what might be called its retroactive effect on the first. In other words, he would fail to allow for any metrical difference between Student B's reading of the first four syllables and Student A's.

^{Note 19 in page 182} In the case of trisyllabic rhymes, there are actually two minor syllables after the major one in the feminine ending. But this is an effect generally confined to comic rhymes (e.g., in Byron's Don Juan: “Bob Southey! You're a poet—Poet-laureate,/ . . . Although 'tis true that you turn'd out a Tory at/Last”), and the humor may be said to arise from the reader's inclination to try eliding the two minor syllables and his inability to do so. In addition, George R. Stewart (The Technique of English Verse, New York, 1930, pp. 53–57) would recognize occasional four-syllable feet in iambic poetry, as in the line “Tendering the/precious safety of my prince” (Richard II). It seems to me, however, that elision of the second syllable in “Tendering” was probably intended even though the word was not spelled “Tend'ring” by Shakespeare's editors. Real four-syllable units in iambic poems will inevitably break down into two disyllabic units.

^{Note 20 in page 183} Technique of English Verse, p. 74. A notable exception to these generalizations is Frost's line “The old dog barks backward without getting up” (Cf. Perrine, p. 174), in which the anapestic second foot (dog barks back) establishes only a minimal distinction between the two minor syllables and the major syllable. But this line can actually be said to support the general principle by virtue of the fact that Frost clearly intended an unusual effect here, one which gives special emphasis to the rhythm of the phrase and the quality it conveys by radically violating our traditional expectations of the anapest.

^{Note 21 in page 183} See, for example, Stewart, pp. 46–49.

^{Note 22 in page 183} Ibid., p. 39. See also Stewart, “The Iambic-Trochaic Theory in Relation to Musical Notation of Verse,” JEGP, xxiv (Jan. 1925), 61–71.

^{Note 23 in page 184} English Verse (New York, 1903), p. 408.

^{Note 24 in page 185} “Author's Preface,” Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner (Oxford, 1948), pp. 5–8.

^{Note 25 in page 185} Dubious because the musical term “counterpoint” refers to more than one audible melodic line occurring simultaneously, rather than one actual and one implicit rhythm occurring simultaneously. The term “syncopation,” as used by Frye (Anatomy, p. 251) and Hollander (JAAC, p. 240), is, of course, preferable in describing trochaic substitution; but Hopkins seems to have intended a broader meaning than this—one that includes not only violations of the metrical norm, but also regular feet which strain against their regularity. Hence the term “tension,” though it really describes an effect rather than a cause, may still be the most expressive one yet devised.

^{Note 26 in page 185} See Stewart, Technique, pp. 77–91, and Wimsatt and Beardsley, p. 595.

^{Note 27 in page 185} Stewart quotes this line in his chapter on “Pauses” (p. 31), and shows how, by neglecting the need for pauses between the first three syllables, one might mistakenly read the line as an iambic tetrameter with a defective first foot.