Carol, I'm sorry to disagree, but you are quite wrong
on both counts. An inverted iamb is not a trochee;
if it were, wouldn't it be dumb to invent another name for
it? The point of calling it that is to distinguish it
from a trochee, because it isn't the same thing. I have
already given several examples, but I'll repeat one:
Like storm clouds in a troubled sky
Because of the contour of storm clouds, the
word clouds is not accented; the preposition
in is. To read the second foot as a trochee is
to destroy the beautiful movement of the line, a wholly
iambic line. There are many other examples, some even
more dramatic, but I was not merely inventing another
quite useless term.
Also, a trochee in the last foot of an iambic line is
indeed very rare (or used to be), but not on that account necessarily to be avoided. It is found in a good many
poems and sometimes to thrilling effect. (It has nothing
to do with a feminine ending.) Here, for instance, are a few lines from Stevens' great poem "Sunday Morning"---
the trochee is in the last foot of the second of these
three lines (it is generally called a scazon):
Grievings in loneliness, and unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights...
Surely you wouldn't lose that lovely scazon by adding
a syllable (e.g. "and gusty") and making it nothing more
than a garden variety feminine ending?
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