Trochaic tetrameter

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.

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". Because English tradition is so strongly iambic, some feel that it has an awkward or unnatural feel to the ear.

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

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins
Fathers brothers nicknames laughter
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun
Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.

The dead go on before us they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort
We shall see them face to face—

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed—
Gold as on a coin or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them

One showing the eggs unbroken.

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Wikipedia