His command of different meters is marvelous; he uses twice as many as Browning, who is perhaps second to him in this respect, and his most characteristic ones are those of gloriously rapid
anapestic lines with complicated rime-schemes.
For many centuries, the alliterative meter and accentual-syllabic meters such as the
anapestic coexisted in the prosodic milieu of English literature, both being productive in the English grammatical system.
Energy, in Madrid's poems, comes from disjunction, the leap in logic; but it also comes from rhythm, which, in these poems, is predominantly
anapestic (da-da-DAH)--that galloping sound.
Ten Non-Livingston poems in our Tables 1 and 2 (Appendix 3) are
anapestic or mainly so.
Hulme's replacement of the rose with the machine as the standard of beauty finds expression, in the academic formalists, almost exclusively with the frequent use of enjambment and
anapestic substitutions in otherwise conventional versification and with a concentration of irony --often aloof or distancing, sometimes morbid or brooding--in poetic voice (McPhillips 9-10).
Convinced that "fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living" and that nonsense "wakes up the brain cells," Geisel spun fantastical worlds inhabited by imaginative characters that speak in rhymes and
anapestic tetrameter (a meter employed by many poets in the English canon).
Much like the whirling, swinging, emitting, energy of the locust-song, the dactylic energy of the filament, filament, filament gives shape to harmonious iambic/dactylic/
anapestic rhythms of three stresses in "the vacant vast surrounding" (iambic); "measureless oceans of space" (dactylic); "Till the bridge you will need be form'd" (
anapestic); "till the ductile anchor hold" (
anapestic); "Till the gossamer thread you fling" (
anapestic).
(53-56) Throughout the poem the snowfall has been described as silent, but by the end here it is deemed "musical." And indeed, that final line is the first perfect line of
anapestic trimeter that the poem has been able to conjure in its 3-3-4-3 metrical stanzas.
The piano introduction, with its weak-strong-weak triplet patterns, mirrors the trisyllables of the predominantly
anapestic meter of the poem.