Just to confuse things, "prosody" means something entirely different in linguistics.

Is Edward Bulwer-Lytton the model for your blog posts, w-lfs-n?

I take no earthly man as my model.

At least it's not a swimming post.

"strike twice long and twice short simultaneously"

How would one do this?

Yoryis Yatromanolakis would be the one to ask, not me.

It's doubly confusing because he clearly means two trochees in a row, not (as is the most natural reading of that injunction) a spondee followed by dibrach.

He wrote something called Eroticon, didn't he?

Yes, and it contains an essay called "On Places of Travail yet likewise of Coition", an excerpt of which I've linked to in the part of the post I wrote.

Then I'm glad I never read that. Meter isn't the hard part in the bedroom, it's giving the praepositio, invocation, enumeratio, and epithet.

Some of us have enough problems as it is just with the exordium.

I couldn't remember the name "exordium" and so headed to wikipedia, where, in the article titled "Exordium", we read this excerpt from the Rhetorica ad Herennium on the flaws to which the exordium is subject and in which "exordium" has been translated by "Introduction", with majuscule "i":

In the Introduction of a cause we must make sure that our style is temperate and that the words are in current use, so that the discourse seems unprepared. An Introduction is faulty if it can be applied as well to a number of causes; that is called a banal Introduction. Again, an Introduction which the adversary can use no less well is faulty, and that is called a common Introduction. That Introduction, again, is faulty which the opponent can turn to his own use against you. And again that is faulty which has been composed in too laboured a style, or is too long; and that which does not appear to have grown out of the cause itself in such a way to have an intimate connection with the Statement of Facts; and, finally, that which fails to make the hearer well disposed or receptive or attentive.

We're assuming that you've already convinced your muse to come home with you.

I'm afraid I don't know what "praepositio" means in rhetorical context.

It's the introductory part of an epic poem that introduces the theme.

Oh, I think I know that as the proem.

Aka exordium, but obviously we were intending different circumstances of use.

"The Woman's Erotic Lament":

He started trochaic
But ended prosaic.

Which is the foot that makes the roots of my hair turn red?

w-lfs-n, are you familiar with John Hollander's Rhyme's Reason? I wish I'd read it a long long time before I ended up doing so.

I've heard of it and seen a scant few of the samples.

The whole thing appears to be available on googlebooks at the above link.

Yeah, it says only excerpts, but I'm at p 16 with no problems.

It doesn't demonstrate the curtal sonnet?!

Damn! Couldn't get past p 23!

My copy says it costs $10.95. A good investment, even without the curtal sonnet.

Epic poems start with invocations, no? menin aeide, thea and andra moi ennepe mousa and mousaon Helikoniadon archometh' aeidein. But I guess arma virumque cano isn't quite the same.

Part of the proem to the third georgic was once my default away message: "temptanda via est qua me quoque possim tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora".

tangentially...

via Johc Cole, one of the Economist bloggers on Obama:

Presumably I'm late to the ball noticing this, but it's just struck me how often Mr Obama falls into a rhetorical pattern of three anapests and a spondee.

we don't get much analysis like that in the US!