Everything about Trochaic totally explained
A
trochee or
choree,
choreus, is a
metrical foot used in formal
poetry. It consists of a
stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed one.
Examples
Longfellow's
The Song of Hiawatha is written almost entirely in trochees, barring the occasional substitution (
iamb,
spondee,
pyrrhic, etc.).
» :
Should you
ask me,
whence these
stories?
:
Whence these
legends and tra
ditions,
» :
With the odours of the forest,
:
With the dew and damp of meadows,
In the second line, "and tra-" is a pyrrhic substitution, as are "With the" in the third and fourth lines, and "of the" in the third. Even so, the dominant foot throughout the poem is the trochee.
Apart from the famous case of
Longfellow's
Hiawatha, this metre is rarely found in perfect examples, at least in English. This is from
Edgar Allan Poe's
The Raven:
» Ah, dis
tinctly
I re
member
it was
in the
bleak De
cember;
And each
separate
dying
ember
wrought its
ghost up
on the
floor.
Perhaps owing to its simplicity, though,
trochaic meter is fairly common in children's rhymes:
» Peter,
Peter
pumpkin-
eater
Had a
wife and
couldn't
keep her.
Often a few trochees will be interspersed among iambs in the same lines to develop a more complex or syncopated rhythm. Compare (
William Blake):
» Tyger,
Tyger,
burning
bright
In the forests of the night
These lines are primarily trochaic, with the last syllable dropped so that the line ends with a stressed syllable to give a
strong rhyme or
masculine rhyme. By contrast, the intuitive way that the mind groups the syllables in later lines in the same poem makes them feel more like
iambic lines with the first syllable dropped:
» Did he
smile his
work to
see?
In fact the surrounding lines by this point have become entirely iambic:
» When the
stars threw
down their
spears
And watered Heaven with their tears » . . .
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Trochaic verse is also well-known in
Latin poetry, especially of the medieval period. Since the stress never falls on the final syllable in Medieval Latin, the language is ideal for trochaic verse. The
dies irae of the
Requiem mass is a perfect example:
» Dies
irae,
dies
illa
Solvet
saeclum
in fa
villa
» Teste
David
cum Sy
billa.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Trochaic'.
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