Þet wé don álle hís ibéden
Ánd his wílle fór to réden.
Lóke weo ús wið hím misdón
Þurh béelzebúbes swíkedóm.
Here we find almost all the rhythmical licences to be found in even-beat metres. Thus we have suppression of the anacrusis in line 8 and again in two consecutive lines, such as 15, 16:
Gíf we léornið gódes láre,
Þénne of-þúnceð hít him sáre;
and very often in the course of the poem, e.g. ll. 22, 29, 30, 37, &c., so that it acquires a loose, iambic-trochaic cadence; further, the absence of an unaccented syllable in the middle of the line (line 2); inversion of accent in line 9, and again in line 81, Láverd he ís of álle scáfte; two unaccented syllables at the beginning and in the interior of the verse in 4; light slurrings ll. 1, 3, 5; only ll. 7 and 10 are regularly constructed throughout. The same proportion of regular to irregular verses runs through the whole poem, in which, besides the licences mentioned, that of level stress is also often to be met with, especially in rhymes like wurþíng: héovenkíng 99–100; hatíng: king 193–4, 219–20; fóndúnge: swínkúnge 242–3.
§ 127. The treatment of the caesura in this metre also deserves, special mention, for this, as has already been stated, is one of the chief points in which the four-foot even-beat metre differs from the four-stress metre, as represented either by the old alliterative long line or by the later non-alliterating line. For there must be a caesura in every four-beat verse, and it must always be found in one definite place, viz. after the second beat next to any unaccented syllable or syllables that follow the beat, the line being thus divided into two rhythmically fairly equal halves. On the other hand, for the four-foot verse, not only in this, its earliest appearance, but in the rest of Middle and Modern English literature, the caesura is not obligatory, and when it does occur it may, theoretically speaking, stand in any place in the line, although it most frequently appears after the second foot, particularly in the oldest period.
The caesura may (§ [80]) be of three kinds: