The octosyllable is perhaps the most mercurial and mobile of lines. Without the structural point de repère of a caesura, it situates itself uneasily between a two-accents-per-six-syllables norm on the one one hand, and a three-accents-per-decasyllable norm on the other. Of course the octosyllable has its own conventions: 3+5 and 5+3 are the classic divisions of the line, though 4+4 is probably as common. But measures of four and five syllables are already pushing towards the limit of tolerable accentlessness, particularly in a line whose brevity tends to encourage a more attentive reading, a reading that positively looks for accent. There may be some simplification in these assertions, but we can justifiably propose that recitational considerations interfere more continuously with the rhythmic structure of this line than with any other, and this characteristic, resulting from the line's instability, reinforces that instability.