I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge scanned the first stanza of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost in their book "Meter and Meaning, An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry".
Here is the way they presented the beats:
B b B B
Whose woods these are I think I know.
B b B B
His house is in the village though;
B B B B
He will not see me stopping here
B B B B
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
I'm ok with the way they've scanned the first three lines, but I have problems with the final line because I run out of breath as I move on to reading it. This maybe the way Frost wrote it but I find something quite unnatural in having to take a breath pause before I start reading the fourth line.
Accenting in English is an acquired art because we subtly use it to slip in added expression of emotion when speaking. We particularly use it to emphasize and indicate the thought process behind what are speaking and emphasize what is the most important part of what we express. Keeping this in mind I think we can come to a smoother rendering this passage into speech.
The first line sets the scenario, Frost is at a woods whose owner he is pretty sure he knows who is. The question is then, if "house" is accented in the following line, then what is the intended expressive meaning by accenting it?
At times, when it comes to the realization of things, we will accent words to express surprise at suddenly realizing something for the first time or, if it is something we already know, we will accent it to acknowledge facts already understood as coming back into our consciousness.
So we have to decide which Frost is doing. Is he acknowledging that he realizes for the first time that the person who owns the woods lives in a house in the village, or is he reaffirming the already self-established fact that this owner lives in the village?
If Frost accents the word 'house' then he is expressing that he has realized this for the first time, because it makes the "house" and not the owner the most important part of this statement.
If Frost accents "his" he is expressing the realization of something already known because it shows the person as the most important part of the statement.
I think the third line cements the idea that Frost is simply reaffirming prior knowledge in the second line, mainly because reading it as such makes it read as a more unified thought process than by reading it as a first realization being expressed, which just leads into a scattered process of ideas just being randomly thrown out.
Plus, why did Frost put a period at the end of the first line? There is a natural pronoun connection between the "whose" in the first line and "his" in the second line, so why is there a period between them? Is it because by using it Frost is giving us a full stop where we can refresh our breath so we naturally start the second line by accenting the first word of it?
So, there is an argument for moving Carper and Attridge's scanning pattern to the first word of line two. Their scanning of the third line seems ok but we still have the problem of breath pausing at the start of the fourth line.
I think again the problem is that their scanning of the last line doesn't take into account of how stressing words implies added meaning. Frost gives us of the act of what he is physically doing, stopping his sleigh in line three, but the fourth line give us the reason why he had stopped, i.e. to watch the woods fill with snow, and since this is the cause of the stopping it would be naturally accented to express that.
Why did Frost stop? To watch, so the "to" which expresses the reason why will be accented to show its importance. This removes the problem of the breath pause because since the last word of the third line is accented, by having the first word of the following line also accented allows us to glide onto line four and get to the end of it without having to get in a breath pause first.
It's a technique of expression he also used in lines six, ten and fourteen to keep up the pattern on accenting the first word of these lines.
So let's take a peek at moving accents on lines two, three and four:
B b B B
Whose woods these are I think I know.
B b B B
His house is in the village though;
B b B B
He will not see me stopping here
B B B B
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Since this is a more natural speech pattern, it makes this stanza read much smoother.
I also find Frost's word choice here pretty telling on how to render this into speech. If he had written "watching" instead of "to watch" I'd agree with Carper and Attridge because it removes the language of explaining the action to the reader.
Then again, Frost is from an age where the idea that all lines must end with some sort of pause, so he might have purposely written to have a breath pause break on line four. If true, it shows the problem with a lot of the poets at the beginning at the twentieth century who were espousing that poetry should be written using natural speech because some of the things that they produced were quite unnatural speech. Natural speech is the usage of breath to conveniently express oneself and the way Carper and Attridge scanned this doesn't provide that.
Postcript: I ran into this video on YouTube where Frost himself reads this poem. He moves from line three to line four quickly without any hesitation, which only can be done any accenting the last syllable of line three and the first syllable of line four as explained above.
The Haiku Experiment 