The length of your lyrical lines can be a great way to create a sense of accelerating, or decelerating, by changing the line length you’ve previously established. Let’s look at an example. Check out this section of lyrics:
Leave them all behind
Whipping past
Can’t be last
Flying fast
You’ll notice a certain length was established in the first line, and then it was shortened, which made the next three lines feel faster. The length of a line could be defined by the number of stressed syllables, or accents in each line. So let’s look at the stresses. I’ll put the number of stresses in parenthesis after each line:
LEAVE them ALL be-HIND (3)
WHIPP-ing PAST (2)
CAN’T be LAST (2)
FLY-ing FAST (2)
You can see by establishing our section to have three stressed syllables in the first line, it makes the next three lines with only two stresses feel faster. There’s also prosody happening since the last three lines are about speed.
On the other hand, we could also decelerate a line, by establishing a certain length, and then increasing it. Let’s modify our pervious lyrics to say this:
Whipping past
Can’t be last
Flying fast
But I ate their dust again
If we look at the stresses, we’ll see the lyrics do this:
WHIPP-ing PAST (2)
CAN’T be LAST (2)
FLY-ing FAST (2)
But I ATE their DUST a-GAIN (3)
In this case, you can see by increasing the length of the last line, we’ve slowed it down to create prosody with what the lyric is saying. This is a great way to have your lyrics tie into what your song is doing.