The Grammar of English Grammars - Goold Brown

OBSERVATIONS.

OBS. 1.—Composite verse, especially if the lines be short, is peculiarly liable to uncertainty, and diversity of scansion; and that which does not always abide by one chosen order of quantities, can scarcely be found agreeable; it must be more apt to puzzle than to please the reader. The eight stanzas of this last example, have eight lines of iambic trimeter; and, since seven times in eight, this metre holds the first place in the stanza, it is a double fault, that one such line seems strayed from its proper position. It would be better to prefix the word Now to the fourth line, and to mend the forty-third thus:—

"And should | I live | to be"—

The trissyllabic feet of this piece, as I scan it, are numerous; being the sixteen short lines of monometer, and the twenty-four initial feet of the lines of seven syllables. Every one of the forty—(except the thirty-sixth, "The last leaf"—) begins with a monosyllable which may be varied in quantity; so that, with stress laid on this monosyllable, the foot becomes an amphimac; without such stress, an anapest.

OBS. 2.—I incline to read this piece as composed of iambs and anapests; but E. A. Poe, who has commended "the effective harmony of these lines," and called the example "an excellently well conceived and well managed specimen of versification," counts many syllables long, which such a reading makes short, and he also divides all but the iambics in a way quite different from mine, thus: "Let us scan the first stanza.