In longer stretches of non-stanzaic 4-strong, i.p. or blank verse, AS matrix analysis is of very little use, as larger units are simply not projected. The opening lines of ‘Frost at Midnight’ will illustrate this. If we start to isolate the metronic, dimetronic, stichic, and distichic ASR, the scheme becomes simply nonsensical after the second level:
Already we can see that it’s not worth proceeding. The problem is twofold: firstly, the line appears to be ternary at the level of dimetron (another way of saying that it’s in i.p.); this means consecutive high accents on immediately successive final and initial stresses (↑ ↓↑/↑ ↓↑). There are more complex and interesting explanations for this phenomenon, discussed in due course. I.p. couplets under ‘empty recitation’ circumstances sometimes display a vestigial ↑ ↓↑/↓↑↓ alternation, to my ear, but are soon overtaken by more pressing local concerns. Secondly, AS is receiving little or no help from the versification or syntax itself. In seven lines we have three enjambments, meaning that the ghost metron, such as it is, is elided. (In the context of i.p., the phenomenon of the ghost metron is vexed. If the line is also considered as a dramatic 10-position unit, it is almost monadic: a hiatus is only a hiatus when a second line is implied in the metrical structure of the first. If the line is considered as a lyric, 2 × 4-strong unit, the hiatus is, potentially, 3 metrons long.) While we might claim that the lines exhibit paired or even strophic tendencies, they do not show themselves interested in any regular distichic patterning. Even though there is a ‘break’ between the strongly stress-based AS at metronic and dimetronic levels and the strongly key-based AS at stichic and above, hierarchical levels in AS are generally formed from the bottom up: when the line-unit itself does not sustain it, it will have difficulty forming at stichic, distichic or strophic levels unless strongly reinforced by formal couplets or other regular stanzas.2 It may be the case that the AS matrix can be sensibly applied only to poems that exhibit explicit binary patterning at both the syllabic and stichic levels.
1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 120.
2 Phrase rhythm analysis and Attridge’s analysis of phrasal movement hold out more promise for these passages, but I would maintain that these analyses are often more phonologically than metrically descriptive, and that the word ‘rhythm’, as in ‘his sentences have a lovely rhythm to them’, is straightforwardly misapplied, unless that rhythm is consciously perceived or objectively measurable.