The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
In silence.
Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien, 230 f.
Immingled with heaven's azure waveringly.
Tennyson, Gareth, 914.
The hoof of his horse slipt in the stream, the stream ...
Ibid., 1020.
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring.
Tennyson, Milton.
And in the throbbing engine room
Leap the long rods of polished steel.
Oscar Wilde, La Mer.
Something has already been said above on the nature and effects of pitch in spoken rhythm (pages 35 ff.). It is a constant factor of language, but its usual function is special emphasis or intensification. By itself it rarely dominates or determines the rhythm. And since the regular determinants of spoken rhythm are time and stress, it follows of course that pitch serves usually to reinforce these determinants.[89] But not always; for not only does pitch sometimes clash with rhythmic stress, but also it is sometimes a substitute for it. All three of these functions—strengthening, opposing, and replacing stress—are operative in verse.
In Shelley's line
Laugh with an inextinguishable laughter,
a great deal of the effect is due to the combination of word accent and emphatic pitch in the syllable-ting-, so that not merely the one word but the one syllable dominates the whole verse. In such frequent conflicts of stress as "on the blue surface," where the prose rhythm is ◡◡ ̷ ̷◡ while the verse pattern has ◡_̷◡_̷◡, the so-called hovering accent (as it is usually described, with the theory that somehow the normal quantity of stress is divided between the and blue) is properly a circumflex accent, which in other words means pitch. Similarly in "If I were a dead leaf," the peculiar rhythm is to be explained as a balance of pitch against stress. And in that metrically notorious line of Tennyson's—
Take your own time, Annie, take your own time.
Tennyson, Enoch Arden, 463.