Why are words like In stressed sometimes and not others?
A poem I am scanning has the word "in" stressed at one point in the poem, but just a few lines below it the "in" is not stressed. Is this because the poet sees it as said differently, with different stress, as I presume? Is the word "in" a particular word that can have different ways of saying the stress?
How many other words, like "in", are stressed differently at certain times than others? I looked and it was not many. I hope someone can offer some advice on this as it is a nagging problem for me. I am new to poetry.
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1 answer
While words with multiple syllables do have an internal stress patterns, stress is more a matter of the role a word plays in a sentence. Often a writer who is sensitive to this will recast a sentence just to make the stress fall on one word rather than another, or two have stress fall on two related words. No single syllable word is inherently stressed or unstressed, it is all about how the rhythm of the sentence or the verse creates stress.
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