[books] Snarky Footnotes
From Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within:
Chapter 1, "Metre," footonote 14:
14. Milton, like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century exponents of iambic pentameter, seemed very reluctant to use feminine endings, going so far as to always mark "heaven" as the monosyllabic "heav'n" whenever it ended a line. Finding two hendecasyllables in a row in Paradise Lost is like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican.
And quoting a line from Shakespeare's "Sonnet 1":
But thou, | contract | ed to | thine own | bright eyes [18]
Chapter 1, "Metre," footonote 18:
18. If you already know your feet and think that this is really an amphibrach, a dactyl and two iambs, I'm afraid I shall have to kill you.
Hee!
Chapter 1, "Metre," footonote 14:
14. Milton, like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century exponents of iambic pentameter, seemed very reluctant to use feminine endings, going so far as to always mark "heaven" as the monosyllabic "heav'n" whenever it ended a line. Finding two hendecasyllables in a row in Paradise Lost is like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican.
And quoting a line from Shakespeare's "Sonnet 1":
But thou, | contract | ed to | thine own | bright eyes [18]
Chapter 1, "Metre," footonote 18:
18. If you already know your feet and think that this is really an amphibrach, a dactyl and two iambs, I'm afraid I shall have to kill you.
Hee!