Robert Sage, in his contribution to the Joyce symposium Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, looks at the prosody of this passage from what would become Finnegans Wake:
She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a plash across her. (Book I, chapter 8, known as “The Washers at the Ford”, p. 202 in the Viking edition)
Here’s part of Sage’s analysis:
Then comes the stronger three-syllable word sauntering, indicating development (adolescence) and leading by a short beat to the epitritus silvamoonlake, signifying full growth (maturity), the further associations with the latter stage being sylvan and the silver moon reflected in the lake. (p. 168)
So I marked epitritus in the margin, and when I got home started tracking it down. An internet search founders on the various inflections of the four-to-three ratio and a genus of ants. Randel’s Harvard Dictionary of Music offers, “A sesquitertian ratio, e.g., 4:3, which characterizes the interval of a perfect fourth.” Not what I had in mind. So let’s hit Webster II. Nothing under epitritus, but epitrite is glossed as: “A foot consisting of three long and one short syllables;—so called from being compounded of a spondee (which contains 4 times, or morae) with an iamb or a trochee (which contain 3 times). It is called 1st, 2d, 3d, or 4th epitrite according as the short syllable stands 1st, 2d, etc.”
I think that Sage heard the second syllable of silvamoonlake as the unstressed one, making this a second epitrite, but it’s a close call. To me, the four syllables sound almost equally stressed.