Till you have drench’d our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
—King Lear, Act iii., Sc. 2.
Note how the varying rhythm in the following passage corresponds with the ever varying moods of the King and the poet: