The 9th-century hymn "Ave maris stella" is a striking instance of the change from quantitative to accentual syllabic prosody; each line contains three trochaic feet determined not by length of syllable but by syllabic intensity or stress: Ave maris stella Dei Mater alma atque semper Virgo, felix caeli porta.
Generally, the meter is trochaic octameter – eight trochaic feet per line, each foot having one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable.
Septenarius, ( Latin: "consisting of seven of something") in classical Latin prosody, iambic or trochaic lines of seven feet (equal to Greek tetrameter catalectic verse).
(Tennyson, "Locksley Hall") This is a trochaic line of eight feet, of which the last is catalectic (to avoid continual feminine endings).
—"Sonnet 71" Or he may wrench the metre and allow the reader to feel the sudden violence of his feelings, the power of a conviction raised to a command: The first two feet of the first line can be read as trochaic reversals; the last two feet comprise a characteristic pyrrhic-spondaic formation.
Each iamb asks interpretation in relation to the other iambs or, notably, the trochaic substitution in the first foot.
This "Kalevala meter" is trochaic tetrameter, or four two-syllable feet, in a long-short pattern, similar to Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha": By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.
A trochaic substitution is quite normal in the first foot of an iambic pentameter line; a trochaic substitution in the second foot, however, creates a marked disturbance in the rhythm.
In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855).
Because few poems are absolutely regular, metre is usually determined by the type of foot that appears most frequently, as iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter.
