(John Skelton: Colyn Cloute. ab. 1510.)
This is a specimen of what Mr. Churton Collins calls "that headlong voluble breathless doggrel which, rattling and clashing on through quick-recurring rhymes, ... has taken from the name of its author the title of Skeltonical verse." (Ward's English Poets, vol. i. p. 185.) The number of accents, as well as the number of syllables, is irregular, being quite as often (perhaps more often) three as two.
Three-stress iambic.
O let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.
(Tennyson: Song in Maud, xi. 1855.)
(In combination with verse of four, five, and six stresses:)
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving:
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
(Milton: Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 1629.)
Here, in line 5, we have an instance of a verse truncated at the beginning,—rare in modern English poetry.
(With feminine ending:)