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tools?–however we describe them, are crucial liberators of the iambic line. They either extend or break the flow, allowing the rhythms and hesitations of human breath, thought and speech to enliven and enrich the verse. They are absolutely not a failure to obey the rules of pentameter. Let’s look at the Byron and the Milton again:
His mother was a learned lady, famed
For every branch of every science known.
So threatened he, but Satan to no threats
Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:
    You might be tempted to believe that for the sake of sense the lines should be written thus:
His mother was a learned lady,
Famed for every branch of every science known.
So threatened he,
But Satan to no threats gave heed,
But waxing more in rage replied:
    And Wilfred Owen’s two lines could become:
If you could hear, at every jolt,
The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
    This arrangement would enable us to end-stop in our heads or out loud as we read the verse. Surely that’s a better way of organising things? That is the sense after all, so why not therefore break the lines accordingly? This is the twenty-first century, isn’t it?

    N O, DAMN YOU, NO ! A THOUSAND TIMES NO !
    T HE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE VERSE IS NOT THE
    SENSE BUT THE METRE .

    Metre is the primary rhythm , the organised background against which the secondary rhythms of sense and feeling are played out. This is a crucial point. You may think that the idea of feeling and thought being subservient to metre is a loopy one. Why should poets build themselves a prison? If they’ve got something to say, why don’t they get on and say it in the most direct manner possible? Well, painters paint within a canvas and composers within a structure. It is often the feeling of the human spirit trying to break free of constrictions that gives art its power and its correspondence to our lives, hedged in as ours are by laws and restrictions imposed both from within and without. Poets sometimes squeeze their forms to breaking point, this is what energises much verse, but if the forms were not there in the first place the verse would be listless to the point of anomie. Without gravity all would float free: the ballet leaps of the poet’s language would lose almost all their power. ‘Souls who have felt too much liberty’, as Wordsworth said, welcome form: ‘In truth the prison, into which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is.’ 8
    Back to our caesuras and enjambments. We may not consciously be aware as we listen or read on the page, but the five beats, even when paused or run through, predominate in the inner ear. The fact that the sense runs through, doesn’t mean the lines shouldn’t end where they do.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
    Although there is run-on, consider in your mind and your poet’s ear the different value that is given to ‘blood’ in the example above and in this:
If you could hear, at every jolt,
The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
    R EAD THEM BOTH ALOUD and note how much more stress is placed on ‘blood’ in the proper, pentametric layout. I’m sure you agree that Owen knew what he was doing and that the line structure should stay.
    There will always be a tiny sense of visual or aural end-stopping at the end of a line no matter how much its sense runs on.
    Shakespeare, as you would expect, in the blank (unrhymed) verse of his plays, uses caesura and enjambment a great deal. They are keys that unlock the dramatic potential of iambic pentameter. Look at this speech from the first scene of The Winter’s Tale . Leontes, crazed by jealousy, believes his wife to have cuckolded him (that she’s slept with another man). Here he is with their small son, Mamillius. Don’t forget to recite or move your lips!
Go play, boy, play. ¶ Thy mother plays, and I
Play too; ¶ but so disgraced a part, ¶ whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave. ¶ Contempt and clamour
Will