In iambic meter a foot has two syllables. It starts with an unaccented syllable and ends with an accented, or stressed, syllable. Hamlet´s opening line in his most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be," is an example of iambic meter. The stress is on "be," "not" and "be." These are the second syllables in each group of two. Another example is from a Shakespearean sonnet. "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer´s Day?" Read the line aloud, putting stress on every second syllable, to hear the rhythm.
The trochaic meter is the opposite of the iambic. Each foot has two syllables, but instead of the stress falling on the second syllable, it falls on the first. The second syllable is the unaccented one. At the beginning of Shakespeare´s "Macbeth," three witches begin an incantation with "Double, double, toil and trouble." The stress is on the "dou" of double, and "trou" of trouble. Although "toil" is a single syllable word, the emphasis is on "toi." Another example of trochaic meter is "Tyger, tyger burning bright," from William Blake´s poem, "The Tyger."
Pyrrhic meter refers to a pair of two syllables where neither one is accented. These are frequently words used to break up the rhythm of a line. Examples of this include "in an" or "on a." The spondee is the opposite of the pyrrhic because it is usually a word consisting of two accented syllables. Examples are "heartbreak" and "football." These meters are frequently used but much less often discussed in poetry classes than the iambic and trochaic meters.
A dactyl has three syllables. The first is accented and the other two are unstressed. "Recently" and "awkwardly" are both dactylic words. The anapest is the opposite of the dactyl. The anapest has three syllables but the first two syllables are unstressed and the last one is stressed. In Lord Byron´s poem, "The Destruction of Sennacherib," he uses anapestic meter in the opening line, "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold."