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Is this word inversion acceptable?
Hi everyone. I was drafting a couple of sentences in order to test (via trail and error) the flexibility of word order in English. I started off by reading this brief excerpt from Walter de la Mare's "Arabia":
"Far are the shades of Arabia,
Where the Princes ride at noon"
and by following (as far as I'm concerned) the structure of its first sentence, I came up with this other one:
"Unreachable seem those days when we were happy"
Would you tell me to which extent it is understandable, or acceptable for a native speaker?
Thanks a lot!
Sep 19, 2019 3:59 AM
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Answers · 6
Your sentence is good — it’s in the same poetic style as your model. That being said, those inversions only work in poetry; nowadays we never talk or write that way in real life.
Nowadays, we mostly use inversion in questions. We can also use inversion after a negative or limiting adverb, although this is a bit literary:
Never have I been….
Not once did he….
Little did she know….
Scarcely had I arrived….
September 19, 2019
It's poetic in style. You would never speak or write this way in standard conversation or writing.
September 19, 2019
