![]() Several other lines in that same poem show a similar pattern of double inversion, e.g. Is also common, for example in the first verse of "To My Sister":Īnd perhaps it's the same process iterated that gives the patternĮxpressing things in the way that Breffni did, and modernizing the wording a bit, we have: Shall exultingly hear of their sons the proud story: Our fathers, who stand on the summit of fame, It's especially common to see normally phrase-final elements shifted to an earlier position, often one that was well outside the norms of prosaic English syntax at the time, and seems even more artificial today: In the " Poems of the Late Francis Scott Key, Esq." (1857), we find all sorts of poetical syntax. Is this plausible? Absolutely - Key, like other 19th-century poets, does this sort of thing all the time. On this analysis, Key has taken a structure whose natural English order is It may help to further clarify the structure of this hypothesis by turning the relative clause into a stand-alone sentence, and somewhat de-poeticizing other aspects of the language: As the subsequent discussion demonstrated, this is roughly as true of LL commenters as it is of the public at large.īreffni tried to straighten things out by observing that Francis Scott Key has re-ordered three constituents in a confusing way: In yesterday's " auldies but guidies" post, Geoff Nunberg observed that in "the unparsable 'Star-Spangled Banner' … not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse".
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