Glossary Term of the Day:

In poetry, a spondee -- from the Greek spondē, "libation" -- is a metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables. An example of a spondaic word is “hog-wild.”

Tennyson often made use of spondaic and pyrrhic (a metrical foot consisting of two unaccented, short syllables) substitutions in his work:

Excerpt from In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

There are two spondees in this excerpt: "blood creeps," and "nerves prick."

Another example is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” which is heavily spondaic:

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
               Praise him.