That passage from Hecht seems almost syncopated in places.
Caesurae will make a difference, as they slow the line down. Too many and you can barely keep the pace, none and it starts to almost flow away. Vowel lengths and consonants will also contribute to this.
It strikes me there IS a name for all this: sprung rhythm. I'm not going to quote Hopkins, he's so distinct his voice takes over from everything. I find him almost impossible to read much of or learn from, he's so intense & sort of rapturous.
However, here's some Stevens (greatest American poet of the 20th century, anyone?). This, at random when I opened the book, is from section X from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction:
The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the bank.
There was a will to change, a necessitous
And present way, a presentation, a kind
Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,
The eye of a vagabond in metaphor
That catches our own. The casual is not
Enough. The freshness of transformation is...
And one stanza from The Bouquet:
Through the door one sees on the lake that the white duck swims
Away - and tells and tells the water tells
Of the image spreading behind itself an idea.
Oh, all right! Here's Pied Beauty. It's familiar enough that we can ignore the words a bit & focus on the rhythm (I'm not doing the indents, & also clearly not the stress marks you find in Hopkins).
Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
for rose-moles all in stipples upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
It;'s worth noting apropos previous remarks the way the caesurae slow it up, dapple the rhythm; see line 4. This is beautiful use of semi-colons!
KEB
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