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PARTISAN REVIEW
poor relation, a genteel pauper whose attempts to shine result merely
in doggerel garishness. For if in Russian and French, the feminine
rhyme is a glamorous lady friend, her English counterpart is either
an old maid or a drunken hussy from Limerick.
2. No matter the length of a word in Russian it has but one
stress; there is never a secondary accent or two accents as occurs in
English-especially American English.
3. Polysyllabic words are considerably more frequent than in
English.
4. All syllables are fully pronounced; there are no elisions and
slurs as there are in English verse.
5. Inversion, or more exactly pyrrhichization of trochaic words
-so commonly met with in English iambics (especially in the case
of two-syllable words ending in -er or -ing) -is rare in Russian verse:
only a few two-syllable prepositions and the trochaic components of
compound words lend themselves to shifts of stress.
6. Russian poems composed in iambic tetrameter contain a
larger number of modulated lines than of regular ones, while the
reverse is true in regard to English poems.
By "regular line" I mean an iambic line in which the metrical
beat concides in each foot with the natural stress of the word:
Of
cloudless climes and starry skies
(Byron). By "modulated line" I
mean an iambic line in which at least one metrical accent falls on
the unstressed syllable of a polysyllabic word (such as the third syl–
lable in "reasonable") or on a monosyllabic word unstressed in speech
(such as "of," "the," "and" etc.). In Russian prosody such modula–
tions are termed "half-accents," and both in Russian and English
poetry a tetrametric iambic line may have one such half-accent on
the first, second, or third foot, or two half-accents in the first and
third, or in adjacent feet. Here are some examples (the Roman figure
designates the foot where the half-accent occurs).
I
Make the delighted spirit glow
(Shelley);
My apprehensions come in crowds
(Wordsworth);
II
Of forests and enchantments drear
(Milton);
Beyond participation lie
(Wordsworth);
III
Do paint the meadows with delight
(Shakespeare) ;
I know a reasonable woman
(Pope);
