So a topic that requires further elaboration is meter, and specifically at what points a poem can, and ought, to deviate from the purity of its meter. Here I will discuss two points: the value of having a predictable meter, and something of the difference between an extra syllable and a missing one.
A predictable meter is definitionally necessary for a sonnet. A poem cannot be a sonnet without a meter. But it is also a good and effective tool. Not only does a predictable meter give a poet something to display against - a framework whose very constancy makes deviation significant - but it also in and of itself gives the line a pitch and roll whose value should not be discounted. Metrical lines read easily; they give emphases to the stressed beats and take them from the unstressed (about which more in a later post); they provide the reader or hearer as well as the author with a structure which can ease both interpretation and the growth of expectation and preliminary understanding (which can be undercut or respected much like the metrical framework itself); and last but not least they can just sound gorgeous if done correctly. A poem - much less one that wishes to be a sonnet, a formal form - that abandons meter abandons one of its primary potentials for affecting the reader and his or her expectations and understanding.
One of the ways to modulate the effect of meter is by eliding or adding syllables. These have a few obvious effects: making the line hiccup or trip, making it last longer or be over shorter, drawing attention to the line and specifically to the moment inside the line where the effect occurs, and (relatedly) raising the stakes for that moment and line. Not all of these necessarily have to be at play - especially not the hiccup, if the first syllable is dropped or the extra one is at the end of the line - but they all can be and awareness of them is critical.
The most common elided syllable is the first, in an iambic or anapestic line, or the last in a trochaic or dactylic; other elisions are very rare from iambs and trochees and still uncommon from the others (except in intentionally mixed meters, where it is not properly an elision but a change of foot). Only unstressed syllables are elided, and those mentioned above are the ones least missed, because they either trail after the last stress or precede the first, which since lines pivot around stresses means they are in some, very very limited, sense extraneous. Mid-line elisions are extremely odd in iambic or trochaic meter because it slams the stresses together and is very very marked as such. In the trisyllabic meters, it is possible - and functionally equivalent to an iambic or trochaic foot being substituted for the original foot - and much less marked. It is still somewhat rare however.
Added syllables are also most common at the beginning and end, as exact opposites of the elisions: before a trochee or dactyl and after an iamb or anapest. This is from the same limited sense of extraneousness as above, as they are beyond the pivot of the stressed syllables. In the case of iambic pentameter, an added unstressed syllable (and again, extrametrical syllables are unstressed, as it is otherwise referred to as adding a foot to change the meter) placed after the normal ten results in what is known as a "feminine ending." Adding other, internal, syllables is again the opposite of eliding internally: more marked with trisyllabic feet (which morph into odd four-syllable feet with too few stresses to hold them together) and less with iambs and trochees. Again, these are rarer internally than externally, and should be used with care.
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