amphibrach

Just to reiterate, the amphibrach here is not a metrical foot but a rhythmic movement.

Rhythmic motifs in both voice and piano vacillate between the anapests and the amphibrachs of the poem, but in no regular manner.

And] there was no wind" becomes "and not a breath of wind any-where" (2:04): anapest and spondee become three dactyls and an amphimacer; "groping their way in" becomes "groping blindly in" (2:06): dactyl and trochee become three insistent trochees, the last catalectic; "took a ship's shape as she past within" becomes "took on the shape of a ship as she passed within" (2:14): trochee, spondee, anapest, and iamb become three rocking dactyls and an amphimacer; and "my view a live-sea" becomes "my view, a proper, live-sea" (3:15): spondee, pyrrhic syllable, spondee become spondee, amphibrach, sponde e.

The iconic design, along with its overtones of 'destinationality', is intended to embody those signs of wear which are the poem's preoccupation; but such signs may be deceptive, thanks to the reversibility of, or relationship of dialectical complementarity between - see the rhythm of Jaccottet's final lines - the principal forms of the trisyllabic foot used here: the amphibrach (x/x) (the 'benign' foot of our first poem) and the amphimacer (/x/).

and, "[t]hrough the classroom window she notes the airy amphibrach of birds against the sky.

It does not seem enough to declare that beneath a seeming "disarray of amphibrachs, dactyls, iambs" there is "clear metrical regularity" (188).

In the line 'All the completion I of my infructuous | impulses' (II, 53), for example, each noun is trisyllabic, and the first two are self-standing amphibrachs (trisyllabic feet with a stress in the middle syllable), whereas the last foot is dactylic.

The final line, accordingly, seems to become a series of amphibrachs, the final one, a catalexis that shifts the initial absence to the end: "Hath mel ted | like snow in | the glance of | the Lord.

Scott's 'phrasal analysis' reveals a veritable zoo of amphibrachs, amphimacers, and antibacchic feet by dividing the line thus: