Poets could, however, occasionally play the stress accent off against the quantitative rhythm for certain local rhetorical effects. The stanzas Horace fashioned from his Greek exemplars possess an unrivaled sense of architectural solidity and cohesiveness. Their receptive metrical framework permitted him to organize words for the maximum of tension and relational impact. Yet these same stanzas never become stiff or inflexible, as if they were mere formal containers into which the poet poured his content. They progress from beginning to end of poem with an equally architectonic movement.
Every stanza seems to dovetail effortlessly with every other stanza.
Very often a single sentence will unfold over two or more stanzas, with a clear sense pause at the end of each to mark the stages. But even when the syntax of one stanza enjambs into the next, something that occurs only occasionally, the enjambment never produces any feeling of disorientation or carelessness. We always know precisely where we are in a Horatian ode and when, at the end, the final word falls into its predestined place, all movement ceases with a finality we feel like the completion of an overarching superflux. For this reason, it is called accentual-syllabic meter. The most common form is iambic pentameter or decasyllabic meter, where five stresses are nominally disposed over the even syllables of a 10 or 11-syllable line.