ABSTRACT
The whole treatment is a case of ‘petitio principii’. When it is said that Donne’s verse is often rough, what is meant is that in reading it one often finds that to give the natural stress to the poet’s words is to obscure the rhythm of his verse. But if we once allow that in poetry, it is not necessary to give a word its natural stress, but that one may remove the stress at will from the root-syllable to the suffix, the roughest verse becomes at once perfectly regular. This is the process which is here adopted, with a rare degree of self-satisfaction on the part of the writer.
