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

In "Music: An Ode," Swinburne may be aiming at reproducing the effect of the classical hexameter of Greek and Latin. In any case, to call this dactylic hexameter is to get about as close as one can to a definitive term for it. There are six beats per line, with each line usually commencing with a beat, and the lines are split by caesuras. Note that the lack of capitalization indicates a continuation of the line where it may seem to terminate:

                          Music, sister of sunrise, and herald of life to be,
                                 Smiled as dawn on the spirit of man,
                                      and the thrall was free.
                            Slave of nature and serf of time,
                                      the bondman of life and death,
                            Dumb with passionless patience that breathed
                                 but forlorn and reluctant breath,
                            Heard, beheld, and his soul made answer,
                                      and communed aloud with the sea.

Arthur Hugh Clough, in The Bothie, wrote dactylic hexamaters, allowing himself many spondaic substitutions:

But in the interval here the boiling, pent-up water
Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a basin,
Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury
Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror