of its level of stress, that does not is nonictic. Ictus refers to the position within a line that is experienced as a beat, or to the syllable that fills it. T.V.F. Brogan issues a stern warning about the temptations of overly detailed scansion: Since meter is a system of binary oppositions in which syllables are either marked or unmarked (long or short; stressed or unstressed), a binary code is all that is necessary to transcribe it. . . . It is natural to want to enrich scansion with other kinds of analyses which capture more of the phonological and syntactic structure of the line . . . But all such efforts exceed the boundary of strict metrical analysis, moving into descriptions of linguistic rhythm, and thus serve to blur or dissolve the distinction between meter and rhythm. Strictly speaking, scansion marks which syllables are metrically prominent – i.e. ictus and nonictus – not how much. Scansions which take account of more levels of metrical degree than two, or intonation, or the timing of syllables are all guilty of overspecification. Prosodists seldom explicitly state what they are marking in their scansions. For clarity, scansions that mark only ictus and nonictus will be called "metrical scansions", and those which mark stress or other linguistic characteristics will be called "rhythmic scansions". Elements Minimally, graphic scansion requires only two symbols, designating ictic and non-ictic syllables. These symbols are typically placed over the first vowel in every syllable. Some prosodists indicate only ictic (or, in rhythmic scansion, only stressed) syllables, but this is not ideal since the number, position, and character of non-ictic syllables is also metrically significant. Additionally, many prosodists divide a line into feet—the minimal repeated units—using a vertical bar (|). When feet are thus designated, words that span feet are divided without hyphens, and any punctuation that occurs at a foot break is typically omitted. × / × / × / × / × / When I | consid | er how | my light | is spent Not all prosodists agree that foot scansion is helpful. For example, in trisyllabic measures (anapestic, amphibrachic, dactylic) it is often quite arbitrary where one divides the feet, and the salient fact seems to be the number of non-ictic syllables —in this case two— between each ictus, rather than whether the repeated pattern is imagined as ××/, ×/×, or /××. Foot analysis tends to