324 The Future Poetry
of a pitch of accent or some helping inflexion falling on the
main supporting syllable of the foot and by the absence of any
such pitch or accentual inflexion on those that are subordinate
and supported: the main accented syllables are supposed to be
metrically long, the subordinate unaccented short, there is no
other test or standard. To take a familiar example:
The wa/
y|was lo/
ng,|the wi/
nd|was co/
ld,|The mi/
n|strel wa\
s|infi/
rm|and o/
ld.|^1Here there is a regular iambic beat determined by the persistent
accentual high pitch or low pitch falling on the second syllable
of the foot. In a stress scansion the second foot of the second line
would rank not as an iamb but as a pyrrhic, for it is composed of
two short unstressed syllables; but there is the minor accentual
inflexion which commonly occurs as a sort of stepping-stone
helping the voice across a number of unstressed syllables; that,
slight as it is, is sufficient to justify in accentual theory the de-
scription of this foot as an iamb. Stress usually coincides with
the high accentual pitch and is indispensable as the backbone
of the rhythm, but it was not treated until recently either as an
independent or as the main factor. Inherent quantity is not at all
regarded; long-syllable quantity sometimes coincides with both
high pitch and stress, sometimes it stands by itself as a rhythmic
element, but that makes no difference to the metre.
The instance given is an example of the iambic verse with
an extreme, an almost mechanical regularity of beat; so, for
completeness, we may turn to poetry of a freer and larger type.
Full ma/
n|yaglo/
|rious mo/
r|ning ha\
ve|Isee/
nFla/
ttering|the mou/
n|tain-to/
ps|with so/
ve|reign e/
ye.Here there are two glide-anapaests in the first line, an initial
dactyl in the second, — three departures from the regular iambic
(^1) The sign/indicates the accentual high pitch, the sign\the transitional inflexion,
unobtrusive and without stress or with only a half-stress.