into turgid and wild anapaests:
(Priamo vi vitam evitari etc.).
And Cassandra’s mad scene runs similarly from septenarii through dactylic tetrameters, trochaic octonarii, and anapaests into iambic octonarii. The tone of such cretics has been caught fairly well in Tennyson’s The Oak,
All his leaves, fall’n at length,
while the bacchiac rhythm is, if pronounced with care, conveyed by Arnold’s
Ye storm-winds, of autumn
These brief experiments on the part of English poets, which show an observance of word-stress and also of quantity, will indicate the nature of the difficult task which Latin poetry had to face in taking over meters native to the Greek language, except that the Latin poet, conversely, must place his verse ictus on a long syllable and secondarily, if possible, observe the word stress as well. That was a difficulty with which classical Greek did not have to contend, since its word accent was musical and could easily be slighted. German and English poetry—except in learned experiments—has refused to face the double task, a task which has fortunately never been compulsory.
If we keep these facts in mind I think we may be willing to concede that the Latin poets of the early time may have called in the extended aid of the flute and of melody partly in order to obscure the occasionally inevitable conflict between the word accent and verse ictus. The point can be illustrated by a simple example. In Tennyson’s song “Blow, bugle, blow,” the line
And the wild cataract leaps in glory,