Few poems illustrate meters perfectly; please see the explanation at the bottom of the main page in this unit.

There are perhaps better poems and better examples than Robert Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee," but we do get an anapestic (or at least triple-meter) heptameter here (with the lines subdivided by internal rhyme):

       And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
      And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
      It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm --
      Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

Perhaps a little better as an example is from Service's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew, "which with the addition of one implied offbeat gives us a nearly perfect line:

        *     /       |  *   *  /    |  *   *   /  |  *  *     /  |(*) *    /   |   *   *     /       |  *  *   /
       He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
      Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
      There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
      But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

And this one by G. K. Chesterton seems to confirm the meter's suitability for comic poems:

Wine and Water

            OLD Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,
            He ate his egg with a ladle in a egg-cup big as a pail.
            And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale.
            But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,
            And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
            'I don't care where the water goes it it doesn't get into the wine.'

            The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink
            As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink,
            The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
            And Noah he cocked his eye and said, 'It looks like rain, I think.
            The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
            But I don't care where the water goes it it doesn't get into the wine.'

            But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod.
            Till a great big black teetotaler was sent to us for a rod,
            And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or chapel, or Eisteddfod,
            For the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of God,
            And water is on the Bishop's board and the Higher Thinker's shrine,
            But I don't care where the water goes it if doesn't get into the wine.
                                                                --G. K. Chesterton