Four-stress anapestic:
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib.
Five-stress anapestic. This is a peculiar metre, usually felt to be choppy and harsh. It has been said that no one can read Browning's Saul and follow both metre and meaning at the same time:
As I sang,—
Oh, our manhood's prime vigour! No spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool, silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, ...
Eight-stress anapestic. This is on the whole the longest line possible in English.[42] It is really a tour de force.
The trochaic line is generally stiff and thumping. It does not admit of frequent substitutions, for many substitutions destroy the trochaic effect. It usually comes to an abrupt close because feminine endings are not easy or natural in English. Moreover, there are in the language so many dissyllabic words of trochaic movement that the resulting frequent coincidence of word and foot tends to produce monotony. Tennyson once said that when he wanted to write a poem that would be popular he wrote in trochaics. Certainly the stresses are more prominent in trochaic verse than in iambic or even anapestic; and the untrained ear likes its rhythms well marked.[43] The Locksley Hall poems are good examples:
Comfort? comfort scorned of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,
In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.
Notable is Tennyson's skill in this 8-stress line in avoiding the natural break into 4 + 4. This break occurs regularly and is enforced by the rime in Poe's The Raven. One of the most successful metrically of purely trochaic poems is Browning's One Word More, a few lines of which are quoted on page 70.
Four-stress trochaic.
Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
'Cause another's rosy are?