The sea! The sea!

OK now, bear with me. I'll get round to the picture in the end. This rigmarole starts with my opening the front door in Cromarty to hear the "hoo-hoo-you" of a pigeon in that tree over there. No, not the one in the shot, the one to the left of the front door, down the hill. Do keep up!

Right, it doesn't matter what time of year it is, I only have to hear that sound and I'm back in year wibble, sitting my Big Final Latin exam on a baking hot day with the windows open. That pigeon was the background theme to a three hour literature paper with, as chorus, the occasional drone of a turboprop overhead. 

The brain having its own, well trodden pathways, I'm next hearing my lecturer on iambic pentameters, in this case "with a spondee on the third foot". Yeah, well, the rules for verse are such that you can't look up one term without first knowing all the others. See the ludicrous definition below, but never mind that for now.

So here I am, on the same spot as yesterday's blip. Totally different weather. Looking at the sea beyond the Sutors and thinking what's over the horizon.

And the wretched brain starts back on rhythms (my mind's in charge, not me). And I thinks, one of the best examples of cadence to sweep you up has to be
  I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
  And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by

Or back in class at school, thumping the desk as we recite aloud,
  Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smokestack
  Butting through the Channel in the mad March Days

I won't bore you with the cheap tin trays. But the rhythm is right for the thump of an old ship's engine, or the oars of a quinquireme.

And who knows, out there, over the horizon, might come a qunquireme of Nineveh, asking for directions.

OK, I'll get my coat and go now.


SPONDEE

spŏn′dē″
noun
1. A metrical foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables.
2. In ancient prosody, a foot consisting of two long times or syllables, one of which constitutes the thesis and the other the arsis: it is accordingly tetrasemic and isorrhythmic. The spondee is principally used as a substitute for a dactyl or an anapest. In the former case it is a dactylic spondee ( for ), in the latter an anapestic spondee ( for ). An irrational spondee represents a trisemic foot, trochee, or iambus ( for , or for ). It is found in the even places of trochaic lines and in the odd places of iambic lines, also in logaœdic verses, especially as representing the initial trochee (“basis”). A foot consisting of two spondees is called a dispondee.
3. A poetic foot of two long syllables, as in the Latin word leges.
4. A word or metrical foot of two syllables, either both long or both stressed.
5. A metrical unit with stressed-stressed syllables

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.