[Mark Allinson]

Carol, a "headless" (or "acephalous") line in iambics is one which purposely violates the meter by omitting the first syllable - so instead of beginning daDAH, it begins with DAH.

I used one myself in a recent TDE post - which begins:

Birth’s another kind of death
a fetus-killing rush of breath;

You can see that the first line is a syllable shorter than the second. It's just another mode of metrical variation.

Re "feminine" endings (sometimes called "trochaic endings") - I always think of this:

That strain again! - it had a dying fall.
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.


Says Orsino, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

And the feminine rhyme seems to me to have a dying fall. So they tend to suit sad or melancholic themes.

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Edited back to add this example of a good use of the "dying fall" effect:

Spring and Fall

(to a young child)


Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.



– Gerard Manley Hopkins