Using Monometer Verses

Monometer verses have been used for emphasis or dramatic effect:

‘Twas on a day
When the immortals at their banquet lay;
The bowl
Sparkled with starry dew,
The weeping of those myriad urns of light,
Within whose orbs, the Almighty Power,
At nature’s dawning hour,
Stored the rich fluid of ethereal soul.
Around,
Soft odorous clouds, that upward wing their flight
From eastern isles
- Sir Thomas Moore, The Fall of Hebe (excerpt)

Note the single iambs in lines 2 and 9.

Poems of monometer verses

Some poems have been written exclusively in monometer verse, for example:

Thus I
Passe by
And die:
As one,
Unknown,
And gone:
I’m made
A shade,
And laid
I’ th’ grave:
There have
My cave.
Where tell
I dwell,
Farewell.
- Robert Herrick, Upon His Departure Hence

In other cultures

In classical Greek poetry, the monometer consists of not one, but two feet when the feet used was disyllabic, so an iambic monometer would be a verse of two iambs.¹

References