iii. 101:

_Ón a dáy--aláck the dáy!-- Lóve, whose mónth is éver Máy, Spíed a blóssom pássing fáir Pláying ín the wánton áir._

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, Jóys dispénsing; Béauty smíling, Wít beguíling_;

and masculine ones in a short poem, possibly by Pope, _To Quinbus Flestrin, the Man-Mountain_ (p. 481):

_Ín a máze, Lóst, I gáze, Cán our éyes Réach thy síze? Máy my láys Swéll with práise_, &c.

§ =188. One-foot trochaic lines= seem only to occur among longer verses in regular stanzas, as e.g. in a stanza of Addison's opera _Rosamund_ (I. ii. 38):

_Túrning, Búrning, Chánging, Ránging._

We even find sometimes a line consisting of a single (of course accented) syllable in Swinburne, as e.g. in his poem in trochaic verse, _A Dead Friend_ (_A Century of Roundels_, pp. 12-19):

_Góne, O géntle héart and trúe, Friénd of hópes forgóne, Hópes and hópeful dáys with yóu, Góne?_

It is common to all these trochaic metres that their structure, especially that of the longer ones, is (except for the varying caesura) very regular, and that they have only very few rhythmical licences, chiefly slight slurring.

NOTES:

[172] For examples see _Metrik_, ii, § 218.