“Never, never, never, never, never!”
— William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606)
Context
Lear has just realised that his daughter Cordelia, the only one of his three children who truly loved him, is dead in his arms. He has carried her body onstage himself. This line is among his last, spoken as he registers that she will not return.
How the repetition works
Five identical syllables in iambic pentameter — five stressed denials of the irreversible. The line is famous for its almost unbearable precision: a perfectly metrical refusal to accept what cannot be refused. Each repetition is the same length and the same word, yet the cumulative weight is anything but flat.