Ha-ppiness

"Love wounds and marks / Any heart / Not tough or strong enough..."

I can’t quite wrap my head around the relationship between stress and rhythm in English prosody. The two seem to interact in curious ways.

Consider the word happiness. When read as part of normal speech, all three syllables have roughly the same length, with the first one carrying a higher note to reflect its heavy stress. But in a metrical context, the first syllable is elongated through a brief pause after it—ha-piness. Dumm-dudumm. To see what I mean, check the way Dan McCafferty sings happiness in Nazareth’s evergreen power ballad “Love Hurts” at the 2:00 mark.