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The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown That caused the eldest son of Heav’nly Ops To thrust his doting father from his chair…A peculiarity of this metre is that it is so simple that it needs to be ‘broken’, thus creating the first step towards free verse. Since a series of perfectly regular pentameter lines would sound artificial and boring, poets writing in English have long allowed themselves a number of irregularities or ‘licences’. For instance, one very common licence is to invert the first two syllables, so that the line starts off with a strong stress. Eg:Down the assembly line they roll and pass.Another is to pretend that an unstressed even-numbered syllable is stressed, provided the syllables on either side of it are unstressed. Eg:That evening I had dinner with a man.Conversely a quite strongly stressed syllable can be regarded as ‘un-stressed’ provided the syllable after it is at least as strongly stressed.