Ruins and Remains

See, this brings me back to my earlier discussion on metre; the couplet indeed is the weakest line (poetically, though the message it carried was too valuable to me to abandon) because of its metrical weakness. I'll see if you can point out where it went wrong, based on what I taught you in my other comment. Personally, I feel that the strongest stanza is the third, though that's perhaps because I'm disproportionately proud of my word-smithery in the religious allusions. I can certainly see why you'd prefer its predecessors though. Thanks for the glowing comment.

No, if I'd stuck the comma after "ever", the subordinate clause would be "as ever", meaning (idiomatically) "as usual" or "as I always do", which is not what I'm trying to say. The ever needs to remain outside the subordinate clause to apply to the birds' singing. I can see why you'd want to add a syllable. It brings me neatly back to my original point actually. It's not that my final line is too short; the penultimate line is actually too long. I've (unintentionally) employed anacrusis; the addition of an unstressed syllable to the beginning of the line. This throws the metre off, and makes the couplet sound unnatural. A better solution to this would be to employ some sort of elision (running together of syllables, as in "theatre" being pronounced "theer-ter") on the penultimate line. I couldn't find any way to slip it in though. What probably caused you to see the second line as too short, rather than the first as too long, was the trochaic metre. The whole poem is written in trochaic metre (stressed->unstressed), and this is unusual in English poetry, which tends to being lines unstressed. As such, the anacrusis probably made the penultimate line seem more 'correct' than the terminal one because it appeared more familiar.

Aye; you never see the guide lines in any sketch or painting, but they still improve the finished result. It's the same for poetry, but for some reason, so few people take the time to even learn what the guide lines look like.