The most interesting, and the rarest, effect of pitch in verse is its use as a substitute for stress. In the much-discussed first line of Paradise Lost—
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit,
there is a metrical stress on dis-of "disobedience." This is not so much, however, an intensification of an already existent secondary accent, as in, for example, Shelley's
The eager hours and unreluctant years.
Ode to Liberty, xi.
as the substitution of pitch for stress.[93] The adaptability of language to metre appears very clearly in such a line as Paradise Lost, III, 130—
Self-tempted, self-deprav'd: Man falls deceiv'd,
in which the first compound shows a conflict of pitch and stress ('self' having a pitch-accent, but occurring in an unstressed part of the line), while the second shows pitch taking the place of stress. The whole line, and indeed the whole passage, though not of high poetic value, is an admirable illustration of the Miltonic freedom of substitution and syncopation—pitch playing a very important rôle. One should read the lines first as prose, with full emphasis on the expressive contrasts; then merely as verse, beating out the metre regardless of the meaning; finally, with mutual sacrifice and compromise between the two readings, producing that exquisite adjustment which is the characteristic of good verse. There is a similar example of pitch and stress in the familiar
What recks it them? what need they? They are sped.
Repetition is a rhetorical not a metrical device, though it is employed with great effectiveness in verse as well as in prose:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas ...