which, with its peculiar sustained falling close, vibrates through the rest of the verse.[100]
Professional prosodists doubt and dispute one another with the zeal and confidence of metaphysicians and editors of classical texts. They are all blind guides—perhaps even the present one!—if followed slavishly. There is only one means (a threefold unity) to the right understanding of the metrical element in poetry: a knowledge of the simple facts of metrical form, a careful scrutiny of the existent phenomena of ordinary language rhythms, and a study of the ways in which the best poets have fitted the one to the other with the most satisfying and most moving results.
GLOSSARIAL INDEX
A few terms not mentioned in the text are included here for the sake of completeness.
Accent, the greater emphasis placed, in normal speech, on one syllable of a work as compared with the other syllables, [6], [34] f., [37] f. See also Stress; it is convenient to distinguish the two terms, but they are sometimes used interchangeably.
Acephalous, headless; used to describe a line which lacks the unstressed element of the first foot. See Truncation.