A Prayer for My Daughter its "metremes", or rhymical motifs, rather than common metrical devices. The poem also may be read to consist of straightforward iambic verse that relies on common metrical devices such as elision, acephalous lines, promotion, and metrical inversion. Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 of each stanza are iambic pentameter; lines 4, 6, and 7 are iambic tetrameter. For instance, using traditional principles of scansion, stanza two may be scanned as shown below, where syllables in all caps represent metrical beats, lower-case syllables represent metrical off-beats, the vertical bar represents the termination of a metrical foot, and apostrophes represent elisions.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard start of that war. It was then taken up in the unrelated Humphrey Cobb's 1935 anti-war novel, although in this case the name was suggested for the untitled manuscript in a competition held by the publisher. His book also served in its turn as the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory, released in 1957. This example is just one more among many illustrating the imaginative currency that certain lines of the poem continue to have, over and above their original significance. Since the poem is long, there have been few musical settings. Musicians during the 1780s adopted the