Edgar Allen Poe alternates anapestic tetrameters and trimeters in "Annabel Lee." As usual, some lines in the poem begin with iambic feet, but on the whole it it highly anapestic.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
Another example is The Burial of Sir John Moore" by Charles Wolfe:
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
And this, by Robert Louis Stevenson:
THE wind is without there and howls in the trees,
And the rain-flurries drum on the glass:
Alone by the fireside with elbows on knees
I can number the hours as they pass.
Yet now, when to cheer me the crickets begin,
And my pipe is just happily lit,
Believe me, my friend, tho' the evening draws in,
That not all uncontested I sit.
And one more:
"Death
with the rush of his harpy-brood,
Sad Earth in her pang and throe,
Demons that riot in slaughter and crime,
And the throng of the souls sent, before their time,
To the bar of the judgment--know."
Then
the terrible Sword to its sheath return'd,
While the Needle sped on in peace,
But the Pen traced out from a Book sublime
The promise and pledge of that better time
When the warfare of earth shall cease.
--Lydia H. Sigourney
And here, Lewis Carrol burlesques Robert Southey's serious poem:
"You
are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak --
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In
my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."