Trochee
Trochee is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: DUM-da. “GAR-den,” “NE-ver,” “FALL-ing.” The trochee is the iamb’s mirror image — where the iamb rises, the trochee falls.
Trochaic meter gives verse a driving, incantatory quality. Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (“BY the SHORES of GIT-che GU-mee”) is the best-known sustained trochaic poem in English. The falling rhythm can feel insistent, chant-like, or ominous — Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth speak in trochaic tetrameter (“DOU-ble, DOU-ble, TOIL and TROU-ble”) to set their speech apart from the play’s iambic norm.
Trochaic substitution within iambic verse is one of the most common and effective variations available to a poet. Placing a trochee at the start of an iambic line creates a strong initial stress that can signal emphasis, surprise, or a shift in the poem’s emotional register.