Few poems illustrate meters perfectly; please see the explanation at the bottom of the main page in this unit.

No trochaic heptameters found yet for an entire poem.

Near the end of Tennyson's "The Lotus-Eaters," as the mariners in the poem succumb to the effect of the drug, they lapse into a variety of long metrical lines. Several successive lines of trochaic heptameter appear, each of them truncated by catalexis, leaving an implied offbeat at the end:

   /   * |  /   * | /  * | /     *  |   /    *  |  /        *  |   /      (*)
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil