And 'Yesterday, or Centuries Before'

The two heroic couplets in the first stanza of Emily Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" begin with substitutions of spondees for iambs in the second foot (plus a trochaic substitution in the first foot of the poem's first line), while the second lines of each couplet pick up on the regular iambic pentameter of the end of the first lines. But even that regularity has its ambiguities. Line four, especially, with its two three-syllable words with first-syllable stress, can be read to great effect with only three strong stresses: "And YESterday, or CENturies beFORE." This rhythm echoes the line's point about the elasticity of time "after great pain". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 1 June)

Third post on the poem here (this is the fourth).

First two posts on this poem: first and second.