or when Mr. Bottomley writes:
Have I broken the bird’s wings to catch the bird?
Have I shattered the door of her mind to enter there?
they are following the same principle that allowed Shakespeare to say:
Dearly my delicate Ariel. Let us approach ...
or again:
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps.
They have in fact adopted an entirely different metrical system not only from Milton’s, but from such poets as Donne, who when he wrote:
Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,
did so in the confidence that his readers would be instinctively conscious of the number of the syllables, and so would not be disconcerted by the irregular disposition of the stresses.