You know what I cannot comprehend?

I cannot comprehend how people fail to understand meter. It is just completely beyond me. I've done a fair amount of scanning in my day, in English classes, where half the class had a massive relief attack when my teacher took the meter section off of the final exam and I became furious that the only bit that was a sure thing was gone, and also in Latin classes, where it is less self-evident from just reading it out loud. (Though I have a fond memory of listening to Catullus' "Da me milia basia deinde centum" poem read in meter by a man with a very silly voice.) And I have never had the slightest problem with it. In English, it is so obviously there and so perfectly identifiable that I just don't understand how anyone could miss it.

Because people in my class didn't get it, and I would undertake to explain it to them, and I would say to them, Okay, read this line out loud to me, and they would read the line in meter. They were saying the iambs properly. It wasn't like their brains didn't understand where the stresses went. They just couldn't tell you where the stresses went. But that makes no sense at all. They can say it but they can't hear it. How can that be? MAKES NO SENSE.

But SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS?

Right? It scans itself! You don't even have to do anything except make a slanty line on the page every time you accent a syllable, and a half-circle on the page every time you don't accent a syllable. Right?

I DO NOT GET IT.

I now return to my regularly scheduled procrastinating and brooding over whether the people who mark my exam will realize that my handwriting is quite small and thus I am actually writing two to three pages worth of material for the average person when I write one and three-quarters pages of essay. I leave you with this, my present favorite double dactyl:

Patty-cake, patty-cake,
Marcus Antonius,
What do you think of the
African queen?

Gubernatorial
Duties require my
Presence in Egypt. Ya
Know what I mean?