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.
A Wrong Turning in American Poetry A Wrong Turning in American Poetry 'A Wrong Turning in American Poetry' is an essay by United States poet Robert Bly which was first published in "Choice" magazine in 1963 and collected in "American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity." It has subsequently been anthologized in "Twentieth-Century American Poetics". In the essay, Bly found all Modern and contemporary American verse (up until he was writing his essay in 1963) to be lacking in spirituality and what he termed "inwardness." He also argued that the vast majority of American poets were cut off from the unconscious mind, that their verse was prosaic and