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“So can I. But that passage is lovely and it’s because of the terza rima. The music of it. The trimeter tolls through that speech of Klytemnestra’s like a bell.”

“But iambic trimeter is fairly common in Greek lyric, isn’t it?” said Julian.

This is a variant on ballad measure, which is to say the stanza rhymes abcb and alternates tetrameter and trimeter phrasings.

But Wiman’s deceptively retrograde rhyme scheme conspires to move the reader to a conclusion that’s all the more harrowing for being set in sing-song trimeter.

There is a hint of meter here—the second line can be scanned as iambic trimeter, and the last line of my selection, “Into the chamber behind the thought,” ends with two dactyls and two iambs.