Rhythm, reason and rhyme: what order is your sentence in?

I've blogged about making your sentence work on the reader's experience of the action. I've dissected 100 miraculous words of Elizabeth Bowen, as an education in writing. And as a bit of writerly yoga, I've blogged a whole set permutations of a sentence, just to see how many are possible. But when you're working with the forward-moving quality of long sentences (so much more flexible and profluent than short ones!), there's another reason for practising. A sentence exists in time, and that includes the patterns built into it: not only the way the meaning accumulates as we read on, but...