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Read the excerpt from "One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Which words are emphasized by the meter in the last line of this stanza?

I, them, wasn’t
miss, wasn’t, disaster
them, it, a
but, a, disaster

User Aruni
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2 Answers

7 votes

Meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a line or a verse in poetry. It is made of units called feet, which have a certain number of syllables and a pattern of stress. Different types of meter have different names based on the number and arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables.

To find out which words are emphasized by the meter in the last line of this stanza, we need to identify the type of meter and the number of feet in the line. One way to do this is to mark the stressed and unstressed syllables with symbols like / and x. For example:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

x / x / x / x / x /

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

x / x / x / x / x /

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

x / x / x / x / x /

We can see that each line has five feet, and each foot has one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. This type of meter is called iambic pentameter. The words that are emphasized by the meter are the ones that have a stressed syllable. In the last line, these words are miss, wasn’t, and disaster. Therefore, the correct answer is B) miss, wasn’t, disaster.

User Xavier Delaruelle
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2 votes
The words emphasized by the meter in the last line of this stanza are "wasn't" and "disaster."
User Bogdan Gavril MSFT
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