In the poem The Three-Decker, by Rudyard Kipling, there is one line where the meter is slightly different from all the other lines. I Googled that line, not expecting to find anything, and Google Books came up with this from the magazine The Academy (1896).
The very last literary device (or vice) which we should expect to find Mr. Kipling using is the pun. Yet he is ever a dealer in surprises, and here in that delightful piece of fancy "The Three-Decker" (one of the four literary ballads in The Seven Seas), we came upon this distressing stanza:
By ways no Gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of Cook,
Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took
With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed,
And a Church of England parson, for the Islands of the Blest."The italics, we admit, are our own. We employ them in the hope that Mr. Kipling may see his error emphasised, and repent.
So that answered my question about the discrepancy in the meter: Kipling did it for the sake of the pun.
But what is the pun?