[Bill Carpenter]

Welcome, Jonathan, and thanks for your very interesting entry in this discussion. I see your "real rhythm" as an attempt to notate stress-unstress clusters as both musical and semantic units, and more accurately describe how a poem is or could be read. It seems to be somewhat arbitrary whether you stick "of" to the end of "symphony" or to the front of "summer," or just call it an unstressed catalectic syllable, but that is not an argument against this form of description.

Your effort at greater accuracy is in the same spirit as using the Jespersen-Iwaskiewizc 4-point scale instead of the binary scale, and conceivably they could be combined, though there is certainly truth to the statement that stress and unstress are relative terms. On the other hand, the binary notation only relates the syllable to those adjacent to it, not to those further away.

The advantage of the more traditional scansion is that it exists halfway between the "genotype" (the metrical formula) and the "phenotype" (the individual line), and shows how they relate to each other. It shows the repeating figures in your couplet, and could have been used to develop your couplet. Your "real rhythm" adds another layer of analysis. The easier thing to do would be simply to add brackets to the traditional short-long notation to capture the semantic groupings. However, I can see the attraction to putting a foot name to a semantic unit like "decrescends." In your example, I'd be tempted to call "symphony," "summer qui-," "darkening," "decrescends," and "crescent sands" amphimacers, and to identify a dominant figure or foot as determining the real rhythm.

It always pays to answer the question raised above, why bother. Can you say again what you see as the practical benefit of adding another layer of description, with or without the more esoteric terms? Best wishes, Bill