The commonest rhythmical licences are inversion of accent and initial truncation. In stanzas verses of this sort occur, for the most part it seems, with the rhyme-order a b c b, for instance in Burns, The Cats like Kitchen, and Moore, When Love is Kind, so that these verses might be regarded as four-foot lines rhyming in couplets.
§ 134. One-foot lines, both with single and with double ending, likewise occur in Middle English only as component parts of anisometrical stanzas, as a rule as bob-verses in what are called bob-wheel staves; as, for instance, in a poem in Wright’s Songs and Carols (Percy Society, 1847), the line With áye rhyming with the three-foot line Aye, áye, I dár well sáy; in the Towneley Mysteries, the verse Alás rhyming with A góod máster he wás; in an Easter Carol (Morris, An Old Engl. Miscellany, pp. 197–9), the line So strónge rhyming with Jóye hím wit sónge, or In lónde and of hónde rhyming with Al with jóye þat is fúnde.
Metrical licences can naturally only seldom occur in such short lines.
One-foot iambic lines occur also in the Modern English period almost exclusively in anisometrical stanzas. A little poem entitled Upon his Departure hence, in Herrick’s Hesperides, may be quoted as a curiosity, as it is written in continuous one-foot lines of this kind, rhyming in triplets:
Thus Í
Passe bý
And díe
As óne
Unknówn
And góne
I’m máde
A sháde
And láid
I’ the gráve,
There háve,
My cáve:
Where téll
I dwéll.
Farewéll.
One-foot lines with feminine ending are employed by Moore as the middle member of the stanza in the poem Joys of Youth, how fleeting.