The Spirits of the Towers Analysis

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line being five two-beat feet. However, the scansion is not strictly iambic pentameter; several feet are trochees. Still others are pyrrics, two unaccented beats; others are spondees, two accented beats. The effect of the pyrrics is almost a stutter, as if the speaker is still in shock at the disaster, while the spondees create a sense of weight and importance and slow the line down to achieve a sense of resolution. For example, in the first line of the poem, the two initial iambs are followed by a trochee, and the line closes with two spondees, four important monosyllables "New York, Year One". In the third line, we have a pyrric followed by a spondee, then an iamb, another pyrric and a trochee, to suggest the panic and confusion of the attack. In the fourth line, the '-ed' endings of the verbs, while not a separate syllable in the way we would normally pronounce them, are present to a sufficient degree to approximate what Gerald Manley Hopkins used in "God's Grandeur", sprung ...

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