ABSTRACT
According to the traditional notation the metre mentioned above consists of five iambi with or without an eleventh weak syllable:
§ 2. But pretty often we find deviations from this scheme, a “trochee” being substituted for an “iambus”. This phenomenon, which may be called briefly inversion, is especially frequent in the first foot, as in
Why, now, are such inversions allowed? How is it that the listener’s sense of rhythm is not offended by the fact that once or even twice in the same line he hears the very opposite movement of the one he expected, a “trochee” instead of an “iambus”? He expects a certain pattern, a regular alternation in one particular way of ten syllables, and his disappointment at encountering one trochee can be mathematically expressed as affecting two tenths of the whole line; in the case of two trochees his disappointment is one of four tenths or two fifths; and yet he has nothing like the feeling of displeasure or disharmony which would seize him if in a so-called “hexameter” like
Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows-an “anapaest” were substituted for a “dactylus”:
It is strong, bears us along in swelling and limitless billows; or if in Jack is a poor widow’s heir, but he lives as a drone in a beehive-we substituted an
“amphibrach”: Behold a poor widow’s heir, but he lives as a drone in a beehive. Naturally science cannot rest contented by calling deviations “poetical licences” or
by saying that the whole thing depends on individual fancy or habit: as poets in many countries, however different their verse is in various other respects, follow very nearly the same rules, and to a great extent followed these before they were established by theorists, there must be some common basis for these rules, and it will be our task to find out what that basis is.
