My students in an undergraduate class, for example, could not pick out assonant rhyme in a Lorca romance when listening to Margarita Xirgú--the great actress associated with Lorca himself--read them out loud. I'm hoping that Graduate Students could do that. In this case the rhymes correspond pretty much with ends of syntactic units, sentences and phrases, and the lines are shorter.
i can hear blank verse, in the sense of hearing where the lines begin and end, even if the speaker doesn't pause at the end of lines. Or if I were reading Milton or Wordsworth written out as prose I think I could simply automatically know where the lines are just by reading it out loud. The idea that we need line-endings to perceive verse is an effect born from over-dependence on the written text.
So the visual effect of line-endings really comes into play where the line endings are not determined by inherent metrical structure. You could write out regular verse any which way and there would be no problem. The weaker or the more irregular the metrical organization, the more that visual aspect comes into play.
Fortuitous example: the mouseover text of the latest xkcd is a tetrameter jingle presented (in my browser at least) without linebreaks.
ResponderEliminarAnd a test: Since his Word all things produced, though chiefly not for glory as prime end, but to shew forth his goodness, and impart his good communicable to every soul freely; of whom what could He less expect than glory and benediction -- that is, thanks -- the slightest, easiest, readiest recompense from them who could return Him nothing else, and, not returning that, would likeliest render contempt instead, dishonour, obloquy?
(Not the hardest example, since most of the original lines end on a stress.)