Meter, naturally, is the most dominant sound device in "A Far Cry From Africa." The poem maintains a normative meter of iambic pentameter, whose regularity—as befits its status as the primary meter used in English-language verse—reinforces the poem's premise that the "violence of beast on beast is read / As natural law" (lines 15–16) as something constant and inevitable. The frequent variations from iambic pentameter, however—both in line length and in substituted metrical feet—evoke the chaos and upheaval of the violence itself.

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