Try this for grins: take down that dusty old copy of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, read a few pages, then shift to "The Explosion." Bet you didn't know that Indian was a coal miner!
that insidious trochee
2003-08-21
Added by: brendan
don't believe what andrew motion tells you in that awful biography. Longfellow and Larkin were not the only two poets to ever write something in trochaic tetrameter.
i hope i'm not insulting anyone's intelligence or anything, so i'll assume that you noticed the turn from trochee to iamb when the explosion occurs.
Shakespeare used the same trick, only in reverse, in Lear ("Never never never never never").
anyway, forget hiawatha. this is a wonderful poem all by itself (as Longfellow fades into obscurity).
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