>>24299968
>So why does trochaic verse exist?
Because, as I said, there "is of course *some* difference between what we conventionally call trochaic and iambic verse" (I wrote that quite clearly and don't understand why you're ignoring it). Appealing to Longfellow and linking a performance is not needed to prove that. My point is that the difference can be named and described in different, more efficient ways than how we usually do. You're sticking too hard to the traditional terminology and treating it not as a description but as something immanent to poetry. This just causes problems.
>Why does it have unique poetic associations and why is iambic metre so universally used?
What are these poetic associations, in your opinion? As for the predominance of iambic, specifically iambic pentameter, in English poetry, that's largely due to tradition. Poetic traditions with strong continuity tend to stick to the same verse (English, Italian, French), which they elaborate or vary in more subtle ways, as opposed to more recent or discontinuous traditions such as Russian which experimented with different verses until it settled with the iambic tetrameter in the 18th century. Alternatively, in order to explain the strong fixation on the traditional verse, we'd have to claim that it is natural for Italian to occur in 11-syllable units and French in 12-syllable units with a pause in the middle, just as the iambic pattern is natural in English...
>Instead there would be a gap, even if very subtle, after 'breath' so that the natural flow would be assumed with 'of'.
See, you made up a problem, made up a solution, and now when I've pointed out the resulting new problems you're making up additional smaller solutions along the way. This is a consequence of your fundamentally muddled understanding of the topic. How that "subtle gap" should turn a trochaic rhythm into iambic is still unclear. What happens to the whole "gentle breath" part of the verse? It just doesn't count rhythmically?
Remember, this is the crux of the discussion, the rest is peripheral. You're trying to convert trochaic verses into iambic. Your explanations on how to do that simply don't work.
>more iambically
This is nonsense. The iamb and the trochee, if we do operate them in the traditional sense, are not on a spectrum.
The linked performance contains no breaks that you propose and yet its rhythm sounds equally natural (as natural as reading verse can get) in both the "iambic" and the "trochaic" verses. So if anything it's an argument against your ideas.

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What's stopping me from reading trochaic verse with an iambic rhythm? The latter's more natural to the English language, so why…