I agree with you, Max. But it's interesting that one of the reasons we favor the iambic scansion rather than the trochaic doesn't really have much to do with the stresses of the words themselves, but because the internal rhymes in L1 and L3 suggest the proper lineation. So the iambic scansion is the best way we have of describing the lineated text. But this being a nursery rhyme, and most likely recited/chanted orally, it's also true that the listener would be hearing fourteen trochees in a row, without a single substitution, which arguably is a more compelling scansion than the iambic scansion which requires us to substitute headless iambs to make it come out right.
PS -- Would you agree that if the poem were lineated as rhyming couplets it would be properly scanned as trochaic heptameter?
Last edited by Roger Slater; 09-09-2019 at 08:08 PM.
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