trochaic

Many other lines in this poem are also iambic or trochaic, yet the subject matter is troubled.

It made “Saturday Night Live” and the David Letterman show; a literary scholar praised its “trochaic rhythm” in the National Review.

But what endured in public memory far longer than the crime was the headline, with its verbless audacity, arresting parallel adjectives and forceful trochaic slams.

The literary result, “Mud Soup” — a cautionary tale that still pulsates with trochaic abandon — is quoted here at some length in belated contrition:

The regular trochaic tetrameter of these 14 lines gives the figure of Lizzie an emblematic solidity.