[Jonathan James Henderson]

Rose,

I do want to say upfront we agree on the notion of not insisting our way of reading meter is the right way. I've read enough disagreements on the matter to realize that differences arise in large part because people weigh differently the paradigms that give rise to meter: the stress-timing of English, the hierarchy of grammar, and the regularity and conventions of meter. I also think we agree on the idea that, ultimately, rhythm is more important than meter. The old thread I linked to was mostly me arguing for the importance of rhythmic scansion in addition to more typical metrical scansion.

However, I do find this subject fun to debate, if only because, like with all such disagreements, it forces my brain to work to try to drill down the source of the disagreements and diagnose them. So, with that in mind, to our disagreement over the Keats line: it seems we only disagree over "bright star" and "steadfast". Of these, I think steadfast is more ambiguous, and I can see the argument for treating it as a natural trochee. Here are my arguments against that.

1. Steadfast

1.1. Double iambs were very atypical in classical metrical poetry. I won't say they never happened, but I can not, off the top of my head, think of any examples or poems in which they were common. To me, spondees and trochaic inversions are much more common. This is arguing from the "conventions" of meter, like I said above.

1.2. The second argument requires agreement on "Bright star" and "thou art" being spondees, because I think if we accept both then we can argue that there's a strong spondaic pattern in this line.

1.3. Rhythmically, one effect of double iambs is that one tends (again, because of stress-timing paradigms) to rush over the unstressed words. This is something Pope demonstrated in his Essay on Criticism. So we would be forced to read "fast as" quicker than anything else in the line. To me, this really disrupts the overall rhythm, whether or not you want to call that rhythm iambic or spondaic. The paradigm of stress-timing and the overall rhythm of IP wants (if we're not stressing "as") to have stresses bracketing "as."

1.4. In terms of natural speech, I think it would be just as common to say "steadfast" as a spondee, especially to someone with an intuitive flair for rhetoric. The reason is that by saying "steadfast" as a spondee you give the term the same kind of sonic solidity that it's describing. Of course semantically both steadfast as a spondee or trochee means the same thing, but try saying it as a spondee in a phrase like "he was steadfast in his beliefs:" doesn't it give the feeling that by saying it as a spondee it makes him seem more "steadfast" than if you said it as a trochee? To me, this cuts to the heart of the art of meter, the ability to find metaphoric connections in the strong/weak dichotomy of stress and whatever is being described.

1.5. In your rewrite of the line I would agree with you, but that's because your rewrite isn't analogous. The article "a" never takes stress in English, which leaves us with two options: make steadfast a spondee and "as a cart" as a natural anapest (scanned as IP it would make "fast as" a trochee and "a cart" an iamb), which would violate metrical conventions of meter; or, do as you say, and treat steadfast as a natural trochee and stress "as." The latter works here because "as" is not followed by a word like "thou" that wants to take stress, unlike in the original, so we're not violating the stress-timing or grammatical hierarchies paradigm. The original gives us the flexibility of treating steadfast as a spondee. We don't have to, hence the ambiguity, but I think the other arguments above argue why we should.

Those are the arguments for "steadfast" being a spondee. Here are mine for "Bright star," which is similar.

2. Bright star

2.1. First, consider that "bright star" is being used as an address. If you replaced it with a monosyllabic proper name, like Jane Starr, you wouldn't say it as an iamb or a trochee, you would absolutely say it as a spondee. In fact, I would be surprised to hear anyone say this as a clearly discernible iamb or trochee, and I bet any objective vocal analysis would find it's either an actual spondee, or so close as to make calling it an iamb or trochee rather absurd.

2.2. In natural speech, monosyllabic adjectives really want to take stress, and monosyllabic long-vowelled adjectives REALLY want to take stress. You yourself say that it's a "heavy iamb," which acknowledges the fact of different levels of stress in natural speech; but that provokes the question: at what point does a syllable/word become "heavy" enough to consider as a spondee? Yes, we can take the view that meter is relative so that labeling a foot is only concerned with the relationship between the two syllables of that foot; but I think this is a rather myopic view, and however much it may help to clarify meter, it really obscures rhythm, which isn't something I think we should be doing.

***

One way to treat this, that I wouldn't terrible object to, is to say that the spondaic trio reading is more rhythmic than metrical, though that does get into the slippery relationship between the two. However, to me, if we're going to be strict meterbators then we might as well just read the entire line as IP, including stressing "as." This, IMO, treats meter more as the ghost from which the spondaic rhythm (as I hear it) emerges from. Any deviation from that and there will be inevitable debates about conventions and natural speech imperatives and whether either argues for or allows metrical substitutions, and that goes as much for my spondees as your double iamb.

As a conclusion, I'll reiterate that, like you, I don't think there's a definitive answer to this, but I do find discussing the different readings and the things that give rise to it valuable in clarifying my own thoughts on the matter if nothing else.