[1] Examples of Latin words constituting molossi are audiri, cantabant, virtutem.
Perhaps the best example of a molossus is the repeated refrain of no birds sing in the first and last verse of John Keats's poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (1819) especially for the way it forces the reader to slow down, which is the poetic essence of this metrical foot.
Clement Wood proposes as a more convincing instance: great white chief,[1] of which an example occurs in "Ballads of a Cheechako" (1907) by Robert W. Service: For thus the / Great White Chief / hath said, / "In all / my lands / be peace".
[2] However, given that the previous lines[3] in the stanza are constructed predominantly in iambic heptameter – a common form for ballad stanza – it is more likely that the meter appears as: For thus / the Great / White Chief / hath said, / "In all / my lands / be peace".
In one literary dictionary, a dubious candidate is given from Gerard Manley Hopkins:[4] As a dare-gale / skylark / scanted in a / dull cage Man's mounting / spirit in his / bone-house, / mean house, dwells If both lines are scanned as four feet, without extra stress on dwells, then the words in boldface become a molossus.