Synaeresis is the contraction within a word or between two words, that allows two syllables to count as one for purposes of the meter. (This is different from syncope, where a vowel is omitted and two consonants run together.)  Most common in English are the occasions when "i," "u," or  "y" combine with, or "glide"into, a following vowel. "Many a," for example, can be heard as "man-ya," producing "y-glide" synaeresis. The word "manual" can be heard as "man-yal"  (or "individual" as "indivi-jal"). In the first line of Paradise Lost, "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit," the word "disobedience" counts as only four syllables; this is called "i-glide" synaeresis. In eighteenth-century poetry, poets flirted with irregularity by using words that could easily be considered as having three syllables, such as "earliest," but placing them where the line required two syllables. Apparently, it gave pleasure to the reader deliberately to alter the pronunciation to fit the meter--a delight in artificiality. Some examples of synaeresis from Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village appear below:

                                But now the sounds of population fail,
                               No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale

                                Near yonder copse, where once the garden smil'd,
                               And still where many a garden flower grows wild

                               Thither no more the peasant shall repair
                               To sweet oblivion of his daily care

                               Do thine, sweet Auburn, thine, the loveliest train,--
                               Do thy fair tribes participate her pain?
                               Ev'n now, perhaps, by cold and hunger led,
                               At proud men's doors they ask a little bread!
                                   Ah, no! To distant climes, a dreary scene,
                               Where half the convex world intrudes between,
                               Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,
                               Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.
                               Far different there from all that charm'd before,
                               The various terrors of that horrid shore
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