Your last point is well made, Elijah. Though having said that, I hear no particular problem with any of Brad’s examples myself: in all cases, he is either mis-scanning the line, or mistakenly thinking a scansion is unmetrical according to any consistent principles, or mistakenly assuming a slight pause or break is impossible before the drawn back beat (or “trochee”).

But Steele’s commentaries on those variations I call “the pump” & “the catch” are a car crash.

There is much to glean from his book, and I’m only talking about a few pages out of the 278 of the main body of the book - but they matter! These are two out of three of the variant patterns containing a beat shift: these are core variants anyone serious about metrical comprehension ought to be thoroughly familiar with.

Whle the swing is certainly the most common of those variants, especially at the line opening, the pump (or what the classically minded call “the minor ionic”, as I used to do myself) is by no means “a rare exception to the norm”! You’ll find many examples in my own post. The catch is the least frequent of the three, because it has the most inherent restrictions to its usage, but the pump and the catch combined probably occur at least as often as the swing.

Even Steele says the pump (as I call it) “is common in Modern English iambic verse from the sixteenth century down to the present” (page 35).

Steele has a totally different way of accounting for, and (on paper, at least) delivering this variation. He doesn’t recognise a beat shift, and the possibility may not even have occured to him (this is perhaps because he takes for granted that two consecutive stresses can only be a “heavy iamb”, with greater stress on the 2nd syllable). He instead insists the pattern shows “four rising degrees of stress” (page 34).

His first example, which he claims to be expressive of ascending “steps” via progressively ascending stress is the first four syllables of this line:

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“With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies”

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Even before we go any further, I’m finding his proposed enunciation forced and artificial. My own scansion would be to mark it as what I call a “march”, where there’s a heavy offbeat (on “sad”) within a phrase.

Nor does his enunciation at all represent what I would call a “pump”: if I were to deliver those opening four syllables as a pump (though to me, it’s not the most obvious reading), I would give a quick, flattened delivery to those opening two syllables: “with how SAD STEPS…”.

He then gives a number of examples which, by my reading, certainly are pumps - but which he insists have the same “four rising degrees of stress”. Now…for that to work even artificially in his “With how sad steps…” example requires a not insignificant stress and duration on “how”. If we compare it to one of his subsequent examples…

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“They drive and squan{der the huge Bel}gian fleet”

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…Steele would have us believe that those four syllables I’ve {bracketed} are to be delivered in the same manner:

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“With how sad steps…”

“…der the huge Bel…”

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Really? We’re to deliver a similiar stress on “the” as in “how”? This graded, progresive rise in stress is forced and artifical even in the first case. In this case, it seems to me utterly absurd. And I wonder if he really does deliver it the way he claims, or whether he just persuades himself he does. He’s tying himself in knots, contorting the lines (in the abstract, at least), because it’s the only way to conform them to his abstract preconceptions of metrical requirements.

And it doesn’t get much better when he addresses the catch (as I call it). As far as I can tell without rereading the book, his only reference to this variation is on page 67, and he confines himself to examples where the first syllable is a preposition. I’ll come back to why that matters.

The only full line quote he gives is from Marvell’s The Garden:

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“To a green thought, in a green shade”

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For my own part, I consider a metrical reading of this line as a simple binary choice. Either pump the first beat of each phrase forward…

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“to a GREEN THOUGHT, in a GREEN SHADE”

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…or, if you wish to highlight the contrast between the prepositions, pull the beat back (at which point the adjectives become stressed offbeats):

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“TO a GREEN THOUGHT, IN a GREEN SHADE”

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Steele instead advocates a light stress on the prepositions - which is a prosey, casual delivery, rather than a rhythmic, metrical delivery. But at least it is a natural, unforced delivery.

But he advocates the same delivery for…

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“Up the steep slope…”

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He states this is “one of the two common syntactical patterns in which we clearly hear the four degrees of stress of which linguists speak”: in contrast to his earlier supposed “1-2-3-4 pattern” this “syntactical pattern is “2-1-3-4”. So he is explicitly claiming that a metrical delivery of “Up the steep slope” requires that only a light stress is placed on “Up…”. Which to me seems bizarre and random: not only because I find it unmetrical, but because I would struggle not to fully stress “Up…” even if I came across the phrase in a prose passage.

Furthermore, it is far more “common” syntactically that the first syllable of this variation is a verb (as I explain in my own segment on “The Spondee & the Catch”). So why on Earth is he confining his analysis to examples that open on a preposition? Is it because these are the examples where he can most easily persuade himself that they conform to his “four degrees of stress” principle? It’s a serious oversight, in any case; this is a core iambic variation.

“What you’re calling spondees, Steele (and I) would simply call heavy iambs.” I concur insofar as the 2nd syllable is the beat (though not in the case of the double stress of the pump: that is a double beat!) The point of contention I encounter in discussions of “spondees” is whether two adjacent syllables can have equal stress. Steele assserts they can’t, but to my ear, when a heavy offbeat opens a line or phrase, it nearly always can be delivered with equal stress to the following beat, and most of the time is hard not to (and I always hear the heavy offbeat of a catch as fully stressed).

I think people often assume (including Steele) that where, for instance, you have a monosyllabic adjective and noun, because the noun is the primary word grammatically, it must therefore carry greater stress than the modifying adjective. But it just isn’t true. Grammatical primacy does not automatically equate with greater sonic stress.

If you disagree, or just hear it differently to me, I am absolutely cool to agree to disagree, as there’s probably no more to be said on the matter! I imagine you would at least concede that a heavy offbeat within a phrase falls in pitch more noticeably, as a default, relative to the beat syllables either side? (Not always in practice: there are expressive options when it comes to a string of heavy syllables, as I explore in Note 12). I concur with Steele, by the by, that a light beat will typically carry at least a slight stress relative to the adjacent offbeats.

I would add, I think it requires a deliberate willfulness to refuse to hear equal stress even in the case of split spondees (a double stress divided by punctuation). I take the claim that two adjacent syllables cannot bear equal stress, period, with a pinch of salt!