The descent beckoned...

 "The descent beckoned, /  as the ascent beckoned."  We know WCW thought he had come to a prosodic breakthrough with this poem, the "variable foot." But the language is oddly abstract. I have affection for the poem despite it not being Williams' best. 

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Oddly, metrics seems sterile in most applications. For example, I would begin with the idea of a gestalt, and then point out that the final part of a line is going to be more constrained that the beginning, and the accents stronger there. Take the 11 syllable line in Spanish:

(uuuu)  uXuuuXu

Accents can fall on any of the first four syllables, but not on 5, 7, 9, where they would be extrametrical stress clashes. So we could see it as a group of freely organized syllables (4) followed by a more distinctive concluding cadence. Another way of thinking about it that we don't know what it is until it is over, so the ending is going to be more significant than the beginning. 

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We can think of a collection of lines, or the lines all together adding up to something more, a verse paragraph, where the real mastery comes. Yet if the line itself is devalued too much, then it becomes ... prose. The extreme is JRJ writing out all non-rhyming his poems in prose paragraphs. 

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I wrote this as an article once and had it rejected because it was too "pedagogical."