notes from a commonplace book...

     'Most of Donne's Songs and Sonets are composed partly in pentameters and partly in shorter or longer lines. . . . In all of Shakespeare's songs, to go no further, there is not a single pentameter line. It looks as if poets realized instinctively what it has taken literary critics much longer to see, that pentameter is different from other line lengths and that whenever it dominates a stanza or a poem, its strength and heft make for a significantly different kind of verse from that which we find in lyrical forms written in other line-lengths. . . .

     'Donne used the stanza of mixed line-lengths to combine feelings of very different sorts into poems of remarkably complex, often mercurial, tone. These different feeling proceed from the lines' different structures and the different relations between phrase and phrase that those structures entail. Usually the line of two or three feet will consist of a single phrase; the tetrameter is variable, but if it contains two phrases, it will often divide int he middle. The pentameter must be made up of at least two phrases or its single phrase must be developed with greater complexity, and it offers room for the more subtle development of an idea or an image. The constant movement that we sense in most of Donne's lyrics proceeds not only from his lively syntax and vigorously prosecuted images, but from the mixture of lines that in their very lengths convey feelings, and even attitudes toward experience, of very different sorts. These feelings and attitudes are not easily characterized, but, in general, the shorter lines tend to emphasize the quick, light, fast-moving, and relatively uncomplicated, even comic, exploration of a subject; the long ones tend to deepen, intensify, and complicate it, to slow it down and make it more serious, more problematical. So brief a summary seems much too formulaic. Obviously, Donne's lyrics do not change their tone abruptly from line to line. Nevertheless, again and again they broach in short lines a subject that at first seems frivolous but is gradually given amplitude and gravity through a series of more expansive pentameter lines, which, as it were, raise the subject to a higher level of serious meditation. See, for example, "The Triple Foole," "The Sunne Rising," and "Loves Infinitenesse,"' George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, pg. 323, n. 6.