Gloria,
The problem, IMO, is in thinking that all types of meter rely on a pacing which is somewhat regular--That's an accentual-syllabic sensibility: the concern with how many unaccented syllables can lie between beats and still maintain a pacing of beats which isn't greatly violated anywhere in the poem. Although some accentual poems do, indeed, have a somewhat regularized ratio of beats to non-beats--4 beats/line, 2 on either side of a caesura, with only one or two unaccented syllables between beats (or none), for instance--this doesn't describe all accentual poems; nor should we forget that the beats themselves, in accentual meter, draw the ear into expectation. I.e., there is an expectation of a certain number of beats per line or half-line, but not of where they should lie in relation to each other or to non-beats.
Curtis.
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