[5] Shakespeare's "Sonnet 20" is an extravagant example of feminine rhymes, since (unusually) all fourteen lines end in one.
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion; A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women's fashion An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
pain-ted pass-ion quain-ted fash-ion roll-ing gaz-eth troll-ing maz-eth at-ed dot-ing feat-ed noth-ing plea-sure trea-sure
[6] The feminine rhyme is rare in a monosyllabic language such as English, but the gerund and participle suffix -ing, which adds an additional stressless syllable, can make it readily available.
For instance, the -ing ending makes available three of the feminine rhymes in Shakespeare's sonnet above, rolling, trolling, and doting.
This is the pattern followed by the hymns that are classified as "87.87" in standard nomenclature (for this system see Meter (hymn)); an example is John Newton's "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken": Here is a German example, from Goethe's verse: The distinction of masculine vs. feminine endings is independent of the distinction between iambic and trochaic feet.
For instance, the Longfellow and Newton examples above are written in trochaic tetrameter; the feminine endings occur in the full octosyllabic lines, with perfect final trochaic foot; and the masculine endings occur in the truncated seven-syllable lines, with an exceptional final monosyllabic foot.
Tarlinskaja (2014) proposes to classify cases like Demetrius or fawn on you as masculine endings (her example is "To sunder his that was thine enemy", from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet).
In actual verse, such lines are rare at best; Tarlinskaya asserts: "syllable 10 in feminine endings is always stressed.