In Debussy’s mélodies, the placement of poetic stresses within a bar frequently contradicts the natural rhythm of the French language. In the case of his early songs, scholars have rationalised these occurrences through his ‘casual regard for the text’, his youthfulness, or his ‘budding fascination with the poetry’. However, the irregularities present in his later songs have not been explained. While confirming that Debussy’s translation of the prosody into the musical metre and rhythm is anything but strict, my study of meter and rhythm in his mélodies suggests that an exact rendering of versification was not even intended in many of the songs. To demonstrate this aspect of Debussy’s technique, I compare a few poetic lines from the 1882 and 1892 settings of Verlaine’s ‘En sourdine’ and focus on a single rhythmic alteration, whose location, in the light of the song’s other rhythmic and metrical events, reveals its purpose.