§ 190. Eight-foot iambic-anapaestic verses rhyming in long lines are very rare, but appear in the following four-lined stanza of four-foot verses by Burns, The Chevalier’s Lament (p. 343):
The smáll birds rejóice in the gréen leaves retúrning,
The múrmuring stréamlet winds cléar thro’ the vále;
The háwthorn trees blów in the déws of the mórning,
And wíld scatter’d cówslips bedéck the green dále.
In this metre each of the two periods begins with an iambic measure and then passes into anapaests, the feminine ending of the first (or third) line and the iambic beginning of the second (or fourth) forming together an anapaest.
In a poem by Swinburne (Poems, ii. 144) four-foot anapaestic and dactylic lines alternate so as to form anapaestic periods:
For a dáy and a níght Love sáng to us, pláyed with us,
Fólded us róund from the dárk and the líght, &c.
For other less correct specimens of such combinations of verse cf. Metrik, ii, §225.