The Passion of Meter by Brennan O’Donnell

Author:Brennan O’Donnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

[“]What days and what sweet years! Ah me

Our life were life indeed, with thee

So pass’d in quiet bliss,

And all the while,” said he “to know

That we were in a world of woe,

On such an earth as this!”

(ll. 73–78)

The first verse creates a sense of being expressively charged not only because of the emphatic pause before and after the exclamation—“Ah me” (an exclamation point stands at line’s end in PW)—but also because of the position of the adjective “sweet”:

The effect—as I have had occasion to note elsewhere in this study—produces a sense of an ambiguous or hovering accent. Is the metrically promoted “what” felt to be more or less strong in comparison with the metrically (and syntactically) demoted “sweet”? If the parallel syntactic structure—“what … and what”—is felt to require emphasis (and therefore to level the stress of the second “what”), the line may be read with a fairly disruptive stress-final double offbeat (or pyrrhic-spondaic combination):

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