With all due respect to Tim Steele, who's terrific, I don't really hear much "nervousness" in my favorite examples of trimeter--it can be serious and stately, or bright and breezy.
But you may be on to something, Jody, with the suggestion that hymn or ballad meter (alternating tetrameter/trimeter lines) can bring a special sense of closure. Here's an old, famous example from Tennyson using accentual trimeter. But he shifts to the 4/3 pattern at the end of the last two stanzas for his closing--something I never thought about until reading your comment on closure:
BREAK, BREAK, BREAK
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Houseman's "When I Was One and Twenty" is another old trimeter standard in a breezier vein--no nervousness at all that I can hear.
Here's another, less well known, by John Boyle O'Reilly:
A WHITE ROSE
The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
Oh, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.
But I send you a cream-white rose bud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.
I'm afraid I don't really have one of my own for the open mike. The only trimeter I can recall writing was a piece of light verse about a trip to Lake Tahoe I took with my girlfriend 25 years ago. We fell asleep on the beach without enough sunscreen and got burned really badly. My feet were so cooked it was excruciating to walk for days. It started something like:
On fiery sands at Tahoe,
We singed our legs and feet.
I looked like a tomato;
You were my sugar beet....
It went on for several stanzas more...but I'll stop here. (She married me anyway, despite the sunburn and the poem!)
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