Trochee

A trochee is a poetic foot made of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, as in the word "tyger".

Blake's tiger poem is built from trochees, with the stressed syllables in capitals.

TYger TYger, BURNing BRIGHT,
IN the FORests OF the NIGHT;

William Blake, "The Tyger", 1794

The witches in Macbeth chant in the same beat.

DOUble, DOUble, TOIL and TROUBle;
FIRE burn and CAULdron BUBble.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1606

What it is

The trochee falls on the beat first, then trails off: DUM-da. "Garden", "river" and "never" are trochees. A line made of them sounds like a drum or a spell, which is why chants and nursery rhymes use it so often. Poets often drop the last unstressed syllable of the final foot, as Blake does in line two above.

How to spot it

Say a word like "garden" or "never" and hear how the first syllable carries the weight. Strings of such words give you a line of trochees. If a line that should be iambic starts with a hard stress, the poet has swapped the first foot, and that small reversal is common. Pay attention to the end of the line too. Trochaic lines often end on a stressed syllable, with the final soft syllable dropped, which gives them a clipped, chant-like finish.

Why it matters to a writer or editor

Trochaic lines feel forceful and insistent. If a poem is meant to sound like a charm or a march, this is the foot to check for. If it is meant to sound like conversation, a run of trochees may be working against it.

Frequently asked questions

Is a trochee the opposite of an iamb?

Yes. An iamb goes unstressed then stressed, and a trochee goes stressed then unstressed. Swapping the first foot of an iambic line for a trochee is a common variation.