Falling Meter
Quick answer: Falling meter is verse whose feet start on a stressed syllable and trail off, as in trochees and dactyls. Discover its chanting force and famous examples.
Falling meter is verse built from feet that begin on a stressed syllable and fall away into unstressed ones. The trochee (DUM-da) and the dactyl (DUM-da-da) are the falling feet, and lines measured mainly in them are said to fall. Where rising meter climbs toward each beat, falling meter strikes first and lets the sound decay, like a bell.
The effect is immediate and slightly uncanny. Falling rhythms dominate spells, chants, playground taunts and lullabies, forms of speech that aim to enchant rather than converse. Poets choose falling meter when they want incantation, insistence or strangeness, accepting the trade-off that it resists the natural shapes of English sentences and takes real craft to sustain.
The poem
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
William Blake, 'The Tyger' (1794)
How It Works
Because the beat leads each foot, a falling line seizes attention at once and keeps striking on schedule. An invented trochaic tetrameter: Winter empties out the harbour. Dactyls extend the decay by a syllable, as in this invented opening: Under the apple trees, waiting for anyone. English grammar dislikes starting so many phrases on stresses, so poets writing falling meter often clip final unstressed syllables from lines, a move called catalexis, to end on a firm beat and ease the strain.
Where You Will See It
Blake's The Tyger hammers along in catalectic trochaic tetrameter. Longfellow sustained trochaic tetrameter for thousands of lines in The Song of Hiawatha, borrowing the chant of the Finnish Kalevala. Poe's The Raven stretches trochaic rhythm to an obsessive octameter, and the witches in Macbeth brew their spells in falling fours. Dactylic meter, the grand line of classical epic, appears in English mostly in imitation hexameters such as Longfellow's Evangeline and in light verse, where the triple fall turns comic with ease.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Reserve falling meter for poems that want a cast spell rather than a spoken confidence. Front-load your lines with strong nouns, verbs and imperatives, since openings must carry stress. Expect to fight the language: plan for catalexis at line ends, and rhyme on the stressed syllable when you cut the tail. Sustained falling meter over many stanzas risks monotony, so most modern poets deploy it in short, concentrated pieces where the drumbeat never gets time to numb.
What poets can take from this
- Open lines with stressed content words: commands, names, strong nouns.
- Use catalexis, dropping the final light syllable, to end lines with force.
- Keep falling-meter poems short; the chant effect exhausts faster than conversation does.
- Choose trochees for incantation and dactyls for rolling, headlong movement.
- Read The Tyger and a page of Hiawatha aloud to feel the strike-and-decay motion.
Try it yourself
Write a spell or charm of eight to twelve lines in trochaic tetrameter, addressed to something you want to summon or banish. Clip the last unstressed syllable from at least half the lines and notice how the endings harden.
Questions
What is the difference between falling meter and rising meter?
Falling meter begins each foot on the stress and trails off, as in trochees and dactyls. Rising meter delays the stress to the end of the foot, as in iambs and anapaests. Falling lines chant; rising lines converse.
Why does falling meter sound like a chant?
The beat arrives first in every foot, producing regular, front-loaded strikes with no run-up. That insistent evenness resembles ritual speech, drumming and nursery rhyme, so the ear files it under incantation.
What is a famous poem in falling meter?
Blake's The Tyger and Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha are the standard trochaic examples, and Poe's The Raven extends the same falling movement into very long lines.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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