The Principles of English Versification - Paull F. Baum

Observe carefully the elements of duration, stress, accent, and pitch in the following sentences:

Now he's a great big man.

He was a remarkable young fellow, but he had an ungovernable temper.

Off went Joy; on came Despair.

Word and Phrase Rhythm. The next larger unit after the syllable is the word; after the word, the phrase. Something has already been said in the previous paragraphs on word and phrase rhythm: it remains to examine them more closely.

Words vary in length from one to eight or even ten syllables; and the accents (main and secondary) may fall on any of these syllables according to the origin and historical development of the word—thus words of two syllables: ápple, alóne; of three syllables: béautiful, accéssion, appercéive; of four syllables: ápoplexy, matérial, evolútion, interreláte. But generally in polysyllables the tendency to rhythmic alternation of stress produces one or more secondary accents more or less distinctly felt; thus on the first syllable of apperceive and on the third of apoplexy there is an obvious secondary accent; on the third syllable of beautiful and the fourth of material there are potential accents, not regularly felt as such but capable, under certain circumstances, of rhythmic stress. For example, in the phrase 'beautiful clothes' there is no accent and no stress on -ful; but in 'beautiful attire' the syllable -ful receives a very slight accent (properly not recognized by the dictionaries) which can well serve as a weak rhythmic stress. Long words illustrate the same principle: antitranssubstantionalistic, pseudomonocotyledonous, perfectibiliarianism. This potential stress is of the utmost importance in verse—as when Milton out of three words, two of which have no recognized secondary accent, makes a 5-stress line:

Immutable, immortal, infinite.
Paradise Lost, III, 373.

The result of this tendency to alternation, or in other words of the difficulty of pronouncing more than three consecutive syllables without introducing a secondary accent or stress, is that English phrases fall naturally into four rhythmic patterns or movements (and their combinations): 1. accent + no-accent (a. one syllable, b. two syllables); 2. no-accent (a. one syllable, b. two syllables) + accent. Examples: 1a beauty, 1b beautiful, 2a relate, 2b intercede. These four movements are variously named: the first two are called falling, the second two rising; 1a and 2a are called duple or dissyllabic, 1b and 2b triple or trisyllabic; 1a is called trochaic, 1b dactylic, 2a iambic, 2b anapestic (after the names of the metrical feet in classical prosody). Beauty, by this usage, is a trochee, beautiful a dactyl, relate an iamb, intercede an anapest. But these patterns alone are by no means sufficient to explain or register all the phrasal movements of English prose—as a single sentence will show.

Here the first phrase is in falling rhythm, the second (probably) in rising rhythm, the third is—rising or falling? To some readers it will appear of one sort, to others of another. The fourth phrase is probably rising, the fifth doubtful, the sixth falling, the seventh probably rising. To say that the first phrase is made up of a dactyl and two trochees means very little. The primary fact to be recognized and understood is that these four patterns exist in English speech not as absolute entities but as tendencies. In prose they are discontinuous, irregularly alternating, often hardly perceptible; but they are there as potential forces whose latent effects are brought out by regular metre.