Feminine ending

Feminine ending, in context of poetry, means a line of verse that ends with an unstressed syllable. Its opposite is masculine ending, which describes a line ending in a stressless syllable. For example, in the following couplet by Longfellow, the first line has a feminine ending and the second a masculine one.


 * Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
 * Life is but an empty dream!

In trochaic verse (like the trochaic tetrameter that Longfellow is using), feet and therefore lines naturally have feminine endings. In contrast, in iambic verse (which makes up most of English-language poetry), line endings are naturally masculine: using a feminine rhyme requires either dropping or adding a syllable. The most common variation is to add a syllable resulting in an 11-syllable (hendecasyllabic)) line, as in the opening lines from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales


 * Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
 * The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

The terms "masculine ending" and "feminine ending" are not based on French language grammar, in which words of feminine grammatical gender typically end on an unstressed syllable and words of masculine gender end in a stressed syllable.

Poems often arrange their lines in patterns of masculine and feminine endings, for instance in "A Psalm of Life by Longfellow (from which the above couplet is taken), every couplet consists of a feminine ending followed by a masculine one.