Is there a foolproof or "rigorous" way to accurately and repeatably perform scansion in English poetry? It seems highly subjective at times.
For example, I can pretty easily grasp the iambic tetrameter in Frost's Whose woods these are I think I know, but can't follow the spondee / iambic / anapest / iambic in his Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
My understanding is that you can't just look up the words in a dictionary and determine which syllables are stressed and which ones aren't to perform scansion. The stresses in the line are relative to each other and "stressed" syllables in scansion may appear unstressed in a dictionary pronunciation guide.
Is it really up to the reader to "hear" the poem correctly to perform scansion? Are there any linguistic computer algorithms that "hear" the words in order to perform scansion?
Best Answer
My feeling is that much poetry in English should not be analysed with spondee/iambic/anapest/trochee notation. Just figure out which syllables need to be accented:
Why put an accent on the word "two"? In my opinion, it's actually completely optional for the scansion of this poem. However, "two" is an important word for the meaning of this poem, and fits fine with the scansion, so accenting it works fine.
But if you ask why should the second syllable of "yellow" belong in an iambic foot with "wood" rather than with the first syllable of "yellow", my answer is that this is a distinction grandfathered from the analysis of Greek poetry and is completely irrelevant to how you would read the poem in English.
UPDATE: listening to Robert Frost read this poem, I would say the accented syllables are:
whose first line is different from what you had. I would take this as fairly good evidence that the division is subjective. (The second line is either iamb/anapest/spondee/iamb or amphibranch/iamb/spondee/iamb, but I don't think there is any way of deciding between these two possibilities.)