![]() Trochaic meters are extremely difficult to pull off in English. The problem is that the hendecasyllabics of Catullus, when transliterated into English, make for a trochaic meter. So, what does all this have to do with Frost’s poem? It’s the reason Iambic meters, rather than Trochaic meters, are the dominant meters of English poetry. This feature of the language has nothing to do with regional or dialectal inflections. In a previous post, one commenter objected that I didn’t take into consideration regional or dialectal inflections. Also, all of our prepositional phrases prefer a rising stress (iambic or anapestic). We can do this because English is an accentual language. (The former also makes sense, but the exception proves the rule.) By stressing the, we draw attention to the fact that the car is singular. In nominal phrases, we don’t normally say the car, we say the car. The English language is a naturally Iambic and Anapestic language (meaning that the language prefers a rising stress). ![]() On the other hand, a distinction can be made between Latin quantitative Hendecasyllabics and the accentual Hendecasyllabics of the later Romance Languages, but that appears unrelated to the whether the word is used as a noun or adjective. Hendecasyllabic, according to Webster’s and to Princeton, is simply the adjectival form of Hendecasyllable (an eleven syllable line or word). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics makes no such distinction. However, the author or authors of the Wikipedia article offer no citations to back up their assertions. I notice that Wikipedia makes much ado about the difference between Hendecasyllable and Hendecasyllabic, (Hendecasyllabic Verse or Hendecasyllabics).English is an accentual language, meaning that words receive more or less stress dependent on their usage. English is not a quantitative language (meaning that syllables are long or short). What makes the poem difficult to scan is that the English language simply does not do what Latin did. Frost was imitating the Latin meter of Catullus – said to be one of his favorite Latin poets. ![]() It’s also one of the most devilish to scan. It’s written, nominally, in hendecasyllabics. While Robert Frost’s, For Once, Then, Something, isn’t the most memorable of his poems, it’s one of his most unique.
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