Like some | fair pine | o'erlook|ing all | th' igno|bler wood,
or—
Which runs, | and, as | it runs, | for ev|er shall | run on;
while he often employs trochees or spondees. He does not use the triplet in the Davideis, but does elsewhere, and, after Virgil, he sometimes indulges in half-lines.)
XXVII. Various Forms of Octosyllable-Heptasyllable (late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century)
(a) Shakespeare (doubtfully?):
(1) King Pan|dion | he is | dead,
All thy | friends are | lapped in | lead.
(2) Let | the bird | of loud|est lay
On | the sole | Ara|bian tree.
(These distichs from the Passionate Pilgrim will illustrate the two different forms which the heptasyllable—really an octosyllable acephalous or catalectic—can take. The catalectic form (1) becomes trochaic; the acephalous (2), iambic. They can be interchanged, and either can group with the full iambic dimeter; but, individually, it would spoil (1) to scan it as iambic, (2) to scan it as trochaic. Yet on "accentual" scansion there is no difference; and some advocates of recent fancy "stress"-systems maintain that the rhythms are identical!)
(b) Shakespeare (almost certainly):