§ 191. The seven-foot iambic-anapaestic verse would seem to be of rare occurrence except in the most recent period; in long lines and masculine rhymes it has been used by Swinburne, as e.g. in The Death of Richard Wagner;[173] we quote the middle stanza:
As a vísion of héaven from the hóllows of ócean, | that nóne but a gód might sée,
Rose óut of the sílence of thíngs unknówn | of a présence, a fórm, a míght,
And we héard as a próphet that héars God’s méssage | agáinst him, and máy not flée.
The occurrence of an iambus or a spondee at the end and sometimes in the middle of the verse is remarkable, as well as the arbitrary treatment of the caesura, which does not, as in the iambic Septenary verse, always come after the fourth foot (as in the second line), but sometimes in other places; in the first and third lines, for instance, there is a feminine caesura in the fifth foot.
More often this Septenary metre occurs in short lines (and therefore with fixed masculine caesura). In this form it appears as early as the seventeenth century in a poem by the Earl of Dorset, To Chloris:
Ah! Chlóris, ’tis tíme to disárm your bright éyes,
And lay bý those térrible glánces;
We líve in an áge that’s more cívil and wíse,