Ginger, somebody on General Talk, (Solan, I think) asked about secondary stress. I'm reproducing my answer here because I think it addresses your questions.
I use the term secondary stress to refer to the second-most prominent syllable in a multisyllabic word, rather than as a metrical promotion.
In English, words of more than two syllables can have more than one stressed syllable. (In fact, so can two-syllable words.) There will be a primary stess and a secondary stress, sometimes even a tertiary stress. English is different in this respect from languages like Spanish with only one stressed syllable per word and the others all equal.
carburetor = CAR buh RAY tr
psychoanalysis = SY ko an AL ih SIS
Tertiary stress is trickier. In the second example, there's slightly more stress on SY than on SIS, but there's more stress on SIS than on ih, ko, or an.
I think where this comes into play in rhyme is that secondary stress can take the rhyme, even against a primary stressed opposite; for example, recipe/brie, analysis/Swiss. But you can't rhyme an unstressed syllable against a stressed one, as in king/dancing. (Don't tell me who did it. It wasn't rhyme.)
In meter, secondary stress becomes important because the beat of the metrical foot can fall on a secondary stressed syllable, as in the double dactyl:
PSYcoan/ ALysis/
Or you could divide the word over mixed feet, in combination with other words, as in this basically iambic couplet:
I've HEARD/ that AUS/tri ANS/ and SWISS
exCEL/ in PSY/ co an AL/ is SIS
iamb, iamb, anapest, iamb
What you could not do is devise a metrical foot that would place stress of the foot on the unstressed syllables an, ih, or ko. Little words like "if" and "of" and "and" can be promoted, if their relative position in the metric foot places them between syllables that are stressed even less than they are. But the unstressed syllables in multisyllabic words can't be promoted over the stressed syllables in the same word. It's all relative.
Re your question about anapests being bad, they are good. Anapests are a more natural and informal rhythm than iambs. Some scholars hold that there is only one foot in the English language worth writing in and that's iambic. But three-syllable feet like anapests and dactyls are the meters of the people. The anapest has a less stodgy and formal gait than the iamb, and may be used in combination with iambs to loosen up the over-regular stiffness somewhat. Use them for the effect you want. They are great for light verse or where you want to speed up the line. Too many of them may cause a stately iambic poem to seem frivolous, though.
Carol
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