As in the five-foot verse, here also the caesura if used at all may fall at different places; mostly its place is after or within the second foot.
Generally speaking this metre is used in continuous verse in such a way that masculine and feminine couplets are intermixed without regular order;[172] when it is used in stanzas the forms previously mentioned in § [181] are usually adopted.
This metre is used also, in an unrhymed form and with feminine endings throughout, in Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, in which there are noticeably more run-on lines than in rhymed four-foot trochaics.
§ 186. The three-foot trochaic line, both with feminine and with masculine endings, has been discussed in previous sections (§§ [182–3]) so far as it is derived from seven- and six-foot verse. It may also be derived from the six-foot metre through the breaking up of the line by means of leonine rhyme, as in the following rhyming couplets:
Áge, I dó abhór thee,
Yóuth, I dó adóre thee;
Yóuth ís fúll of spórt,
Áge’s bréath is shórt.Passionate Pilgrim, No. 12.
§ 187. Two-foot trochaic lines generally occur among longer lines of anisometrical stanzas; but we also find them now and then without longer lines in stanzas and poems. Feminine verses of this kind, which may be regarded as four-foot lines broken up by leonine rhyme, we have in Dodsley (Poets, xi. 112):
Lóve comméncing,