Read The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within for Free Online Page B

be my knell. ¶ Go play, boy, play. ¶ There have been,
Or I am much deceived, ¶ cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is, ¶ even at this present,
Now, ¶ while I speak this, ¶ holds his wife by th’arm
That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence,
And his pond fished by his next neighbour, ¶ by
Sir Smile, his neighbour. ¶ Nay there’s comfort in’t,
Whiles other men have gates, ¶ and those gates opened,
As mine, against their will. ¶ Should all despair
That have revolted wives, ¶ the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. ¶ Physic for’t there’s none.
    Fourteen lines, but sixteen caesuras and seven enjambments: the verse in its stop-start jerking is as pathological and possessed as the mind of the man speaking. Compare it to another fourteen lines, the fourteen lines of the famous Eighteenth sonnet: out loud, please, or as near as dammit:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, ¶ and this gives life to thee.
    No run-ons at all, and just one caesura, 9 an absolute killer example, which gives weight to the grand and glorious resolution of the sonnet delivered by those three final feet: ‘and this gives life to thee ’. The perfectly end-stopped verse, unbroken by caesura up until that point, perfectly reflects a sense of assurance, just as the broken, spasmodic breaks and runs of Leontes’s ravings perfectly reflect the opposite: a crazed and unstable state of mind.
    Macbeth, considering whether or not to kill Duncan and grasp his destiny, is in something of a dither too. Say this:
–I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent ¶ but only
Vaulting ambition ¶ which o’erleaps itself
And falls on th’ other ¶–How now! what news?
Macbeth , Act I, Scene 7
    How insupportably dull and lifeless dramatic verse would be if made up only of end-stopped lines. How imponderably perfect a poem can be if it is all end-stopped.
    I should mention here that in performance many Shakespearean actors will give a vocal (and often almost imperceptible) end-stop to a line, even when there is clear run-on in its sense. In the same way that the verse works better to the eye and inner ear when the metric structure is in clear pentameters, so spoken verse can work better when the actor represents each line with a faint pause or breath. It is a matter of fashion, context and preference. Some theatre directors hate dramatic end-stopping and are determined that meaning should take precedence over metre, others insist upon it (sometimes at the expense of clarity). An actor friend of mine, unaware of the jargon, was very alarmed on his first day as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company to hear an old hand ask the director before the first read-through of a new production: ‘Are we end-stopping, darling?’ Took him three weeks to dare to ask what it meant: he had imagined it was something to do with rehearsal tea breaks.
    Robert Browning, some of whose most memorable verse took the form of the dramatic monologue (not verse written for the stage, but poems written as if spoken by a first-person narrator), was an absolute master of the interior rhythmic play possible within the wider structures of the metre. Out loud:
No, friend, you do not beat me: hearken why!
The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,
Is not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,–but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means; a very different