a RegEx puzzle

[Roy Smith]

Charles Hartman  <charles.hartman at conncoll.edu> wrote:
>> Hmmm.  Are you, by any chance, looking for meter patterns in verse?
>
>Yes, of course.

Ah, now it's a lot clearer.  When you said you were looking for
"pairs", I was thinking "pairs of numbers, representing the start and
end of the string".  Now that I've got the context, it's obvious that
when you said "pairs", you meant "feet".

Now that I've got the picture, I need to think a bit about the best
way to solve the problem.