Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Shakespeare's well-known sonnet 129 exemplifies the ways in which the tension between metrical pattern and speech rhythm can be a source of energy and a mode of making meaning. Two of the main resources available to the poet writing in meter are the tension between the line and the sentence (this is available to the poet writing in free verse, but what poet and critic John Hollander calls the metrical contract of, say, the iambic pentameter line foregrounds the reader’s expectations of the shape of the line and thus also foregrounds violations of those expectations and deviations from that shape), and the tension between the meter and the speech rhythm (this is a resource that is largely lost to the poet writing in free verse).
