PLEASE USE YOUR BROWSER'S BACK ARROW TO RETURN TO THE TABLE.

In the Renaissance, some English poets wrote in iambic heptameter, which they called "fourteeners" because of the number of syllables. The line tended to divide itself into tetrameters and trimeters, and later poets simply wrote in the ballad stanza (or common measure of hymns), which consist of these meters. The following is from Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe":

 *  / | *  / |  *   /  | *      /   |    *       /   |   *  * | *     /
As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear.

Iambic heptameter (template: * / | * / | * / | * / | * / | * / | * / ), with some substitution and some feminine rhymes, is definitely the meter chosen by Poe for "Lenore":

                             "Avaunt! avaunt! from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven-
                               From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven-
                               From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of
                                    Heaven!
                               Let no bell toll, then,- lest her soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
                               Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damned Earth!
                               And I!- to-night my heart is light!- no dirge will I upraise,
                               But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days!"
 

Here is a somewhat mechanical example by William Cullen Bryant:

                  A lovely woman from the wood comes suddenly in sight;
                  Her merry eye is full and black, her cheek is brown and bright;
                  She wears a tunic of the blue, her belt with beads is strung,
                  And yet she speaks in gentle tones, and in the English tongue.
 
 
 
 

And here is a nineteenth-century example:

Translation of Callimachus' 2d Epigram

            THEY told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
            They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
            I wept as I remember'd how often you and I
            Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

            And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
            A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest,
            Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
            For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
                                                            --William Cory