Requiem For An Impossible Love

Anyone writing the Dies Irae part of a Requiem is confronted with how to match musical tempo with a poetic tempo of rhymed triplets. Music wants to be in rhymed couplets or such. So, the composer has a problem. A low grade solution is to repeat the last line of the poem as part of a second musical couplet, or simply repeat the musical couplet with an accompaniment, while the voice remains silent. Sometimes you get lucky and the melody simply takes over and the words fall where they do, and it works.
Such is the case for my first Reqiuem - both the low grade version and the lucky one that occurs in "Recordare Jesu Pie". But now I am writing a new Requiem. Sponsored in part by a lack of creative output in other directions and also by a sad example of "no fool like an old fool", my emotions are at a high point and I am writing music to compensate. And this time I solved the rhyming triplet problem in another way that works but also has a rational explanation:
There is a device you can use in melody where you echo a last phrase, extending the musical tempo with an extra measure or two. I found that by slowing down the relation between syllables and musical beats, at the same time as doing such an echo, allows the obnoxious third line to be spread out over an extra unit of the musical tempo. Surprisingly, this redefines its relation to a correct musical tempo and seems to work.