Talk:Trochaic tetrameter

Pop Culture reference
In season 4 of the TV series West Wing, episode 13, Inauguration Part 1, at the 5:58 minute mark, the character of Toby Ziegler informs the president that the Chief Justice wrote an opinion using trochaic tetrameter.

Potus lies (talk) 14:49, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Hiawatha
I realize it is conventional wisdom to cite Hiawatha as trochaic tetrameter, but I would venture that it's a bad example. Hiawatha, like the Kalevala that inspired it, is based on a five-beat rhythm (as acknowledged in Wikipedia's Kalevala article). The fifth beat comes from the fact that the final foot of the line should be recited with two long syllables. This is clearly Longfellow's intention, as evidenced by the abundance of feet in the final position which are essentially spondaic, frequently compound nouns -- pine-trees, wigwam, war-clubs, firefly, eyelids, midnight, rainbow, all from the Childhood extract -- and that among the trochees in the final position on the line, one almost never finds one in which the weak syllable is not easily lengthened.

Now I realize that it is Wikipedia's purpose to reflect the general literature, and you can find plenty of encyclopedias and poetry books which define the Kalevala meter simply as "trochaic tetrameter" and leave it at that, but to repeat this without further explanation is to perpetuate misunderstanding of these poems. Iglew (talk) 22:34, 15 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I'll start off by saying I have zero expertise here and I have never studied poetry. So, with that in mind, reading the Song of Hiawatha without anyone telling me how it should sound, to me the natural emphasis pattern is closer to what I believe is called tertius paeon dimeter. Instead of four trochee feet per line, it seems to me that two feet of four syllables each, with just the third syllable of each foot stressed, fits the words of the poem better. Again, I don't know what Longfellow intended, and I don't know how Kalevala sounds, it just strikes me that if I were reading Hiawatha I would do the following:
 * By the shores of Gitchee Gumee
 * By the shining Big-Sea-Water
 * Stood the wigwam of Nokomis
 * Daughter of the moon Nokomis
 * Or at least something very close to that. I definitely would not put equal emphasis on, eg., the first and third syllables of each line. If we were rating stress levels like movies I might say it goes 2-1-4-1-2-1-4-1. I don't know if there's a term for medium-stress syllables though. Qaanol (talk) 15:05, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

TMNT and other TT wikipedia article names
http://xkcd.com/1412/

Zilcho (talk) 15:07, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Children's music
Will add if I can that children's music and some children's books like Dr Seuss use trochees a lot, often to the exclusion of all else. Though e.g. twinkle twinkle little star/ abcdefg/catch a tiger all end with a swallowed syllable. Lollipop (talk) 19:44, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Larkin example
Larkin's Explosion is not a particularly "clear" example of trochaic tetrameter, since it contains verses like this:
 * At noon there came a tremor; cows
 * Stopped chewing for a second; sun
 * Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.

That doesn't seem very trochaic to me! Perhaps a better and shorter example could be substituted. Kanjuzi (talk) 16:47, 24 May 2022 (UTC)