Stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry

Position:Home>Poetry> Stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry - help needed?

Question:

In the poem, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William Wordsworth, I am having problems marking these two lines:

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze!.

Continuous as the stars that shine

To put them in context, the poem goes:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
FLUTTERING AND DANCING IN THE BREEZE!.

CONTINUOUS AS THE STARS THAT SHINE
And twinkle on the milky way
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:

Thanks for any help!Www@QuestionHome@Com

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

The first of your lines conveys the sense of fluttering by adding an extra syllable to the line, replacing the first iamb with a dactyl!.

-`-`-`-` becomes`---`-`-`

This sounds good because there is a secondary stress in the middle of the three unstressed syllables, so this line has almost a trochaic rhythm!. Sometimes it helps to use three levels of stress marks: ^-`-^-`-^ or I prefer: `-`-^-`-^!. This revels the internal rhyme in fluttering/ring on the medium stresses too!.

So in summary I think either of these are equally good for the first one:

1) `---`-`-` or `-`-`-`-`

The second questionable line conveys the sense of continuousness by adding a syllable with no consonants -u- in continuous!. If you elide the -u- as a diphthong (perhaps: continywus) you retrieve the poem's canonical iambic tetrameter!. I definitely think Wordsworth preferred this syllable to be luxuriantly enunciated as an unstressed syllable!. Hence: -`--`-`-`!. But using secondary marks: -^`-`-^-^ suggests alternatively leaving `as' unstressed: -`----`-`!. I think these two readings are equally valid, but suggest more a difference in notation than in reading!. So:

2) -`--`-`-` or -`---`-`!.

You may think this silly, but I think the speaker in this video reads the poem the way I like to hear it: http://www!.youtube!.com/watch!?v=e3ZuPR8QQ!.!.!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Read it aloud and realize that he purposely changed the stress at this point of the poem because he wanted to change the mood of what was happening in the scene described!. These two lines are almost completely stressed equally and strongly, in a purposeful opposition to the rest of the lines, FOR EMPHASIS!.Www@QuestionHome@Com