Form and prosody aren't usually on anybody's mind until after the first line or two. There's a summons in those first words; they're like a tuning fork and if things go right the tune of the whole poem will get established and sustained in the opening move or movement. Usually, to tell you the truth, I just follow my ear. If I'm working with pentameters, I do often beat out the line with my fingers—Marie used to tell me to watch the road when she'd see me starting to tap the steering wheel. But early on I tended to go more with the camber and timbre of my voice and didn't think too much about keeping the accent or being metrically correct. In fact, I intended the thing to be a bit bumpy and more or less avoided correctness of that kind. If anything has happened over the years, it's that I've become more conscious of the rules. I take more care with the tum-ti-tum factor. And I'm not sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Hopkins was my first love, after all.
— Seamus Heaney, “The Art of Poetry No. 75,” The Paris Review