Hendecasyllabic scansion12/31/2023 ![]() I also imagine someone will take issue with the scansions! Fun! But I love analyzing technique, and I think the meter of this poem brings up interesting questions about scansion in general. ![]() This is too much crap about two lines, and sorry to be a windbag. This kind of ambiguity seems to come up a lot in latter-day meter-conscious poets: Lots of Auden ("Funeral Blues" comes to mind), Hardy ("Neutral Tones" comes to mind), a few writers of modernist free verse. At any rate, the context laid by the first two beats, and the two offbeats that follow the second, sort of demands that "-out" in "without" become an accent, so why not keep going that way? No reason to back up and start counting. I would think, since it's a poem and not a linguistics exercise, the poem asks to be read as accentual. The thing is to see whether or not anything points you in one of the directions. They're both there, playing (modestly, maybe intuitively) against each other. Both scansions can be technically accurate as long as they're both reasonable for one reason or another, but one of them takes into account the less lofty, more artificial performative aspect, and the other takes into account the orthodox and subtler aspect. Without really wanting to say what Frost intended, I'd say I think a poem should be read as whatever it is. The OLD dog barks BACKwards withOUT getting UP. That's a long way to go for an intelligible reading of the poem as accentual-syllabic in its intention. There are, as there frequently are, ambiguous rhythms (e.g., "old dog" - 43?" "without getting up" - 13214? "I can remember" - 21241?). The old dog barks backwards without getting up.įor the record, I'm trying to say it to myself as naturally as I can. If you scan this as accentual-syllabic verse, the results are bizarre (which is OK):
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