L. Later Rhymelessness
(a) M. Arnold (The Strayed Reveller. Words printed exactly as original, except the added "and"; the also added brackets show the unconscious decasyllabism):
[Ever new magic!
Hast thou then lured hither,]
[Wonderful Goddess, by thy art,
The young], [languid-eyed Ampelus,
Iacchus' darling—]
. . . . . . .
[They see the Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,]
[His frail boat moor'd to
A floating isle thick-matted]
[With large-leaved [and] low-creeping melon-leaves,]
[x]And the dark cucumber.
[He reaps, and stows them,
Drifting—drifting;—round him,
[Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake-waves,]
[y]The mountains ring them.
(Here the first piece is three pure decasyllables, with redundance, cut into five. The second requires only the addition of the italicised "and" to make it a complete blank-verse passage with two shortened lines or half-lines, x and y, of the kind common in Shakespeare. The poem is crammed with shorter stanza-pieces of the same kind.)
(b) Mr. Henley ("Speed." Printed as original and as prose):
Roads where the stalwart
Soldier of Cæsar
Put by his bread
And his garlic, and girding
[His conquering sword
To his unconquered thigh,]
Lay down in his armour,
And went to his Gods
By the way that he'd made.
Roads where the stalwart soldier of Cæsar put by his bread and his garlic, and girding [his conquering sword to his unconquered thigh,] lay down in his armour, and went to his Gods by the way he had made.
(The decasyllable is not quite avoided even here, as in the bracketed phrase. But the main point is that the thing reads perfectly well as prose, with no obvious suggestion of metre at all.)