Kalevala meter

Trochaic tetrameter is a meter in poetry. It refers to a line of four trochaic feet. The word "tetrameter" simply means that the poem has four trochees. A trochee is a long syllable, or stressed syllable, followed by a short, or unstressed, one. Stresses on a syllable are detected by simply noting which syllable one puts stress on when saying the word. In many cases, this is the syllable which is pronounced loudest in the word, for example, the word 'purity' will take a stress on the first syllable and an unstress on the others.

Because English tradition is so strongly iambic, some feel that trochaic meters have an awkward or unnatural feel to the ear.

A line of trochaic tetrameter has the following rhythm:

Using the classical symbols longum and breve (or brevis) a line of line of trochaic tetrameter can be represented as follows:

Two of the best-known examples are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha and the Finnish Kalevala.

This can be demonstrated in the following famous excerpt from "Hiawatha's Childhood", where the accented syllables of each trochee have been bolded:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

The Kalevala also follows a loose trochaic tetrameter, though it also has some slight variations to the normal pattern, which cause some people to term it the "Kalevala Metre".

Another clear example is Philip Larkin's "The Explosion".

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