I have previously stated in this space that I am less than fully comfortable with the idea of the pyrrhic foot in English. Obviously there cannot be fully pyrrhic lines; English craves stress like I crave chocolate ice cream, and a line without any stressed syllables would end up forcing a stress in speech. The mind rebels.
Spondees are better; one can imagine monometer and possibly even dimeter lines that are entirely spondaic, because English will drink up the extra stresses, particularly with monosyllabic words or spondaic words like baseball. But longer spondaic lines seem odd as well; English builds up its love for stress on the back of unstressed syllables, sometimes long scudding swathes of them (like the common preposition-article construction you see in "on the back"). So in a broad sense, neither of these feet works as the meter of an entire poem.
But there are arguments for and against their application to English poetry as substitute feet within a larger metrical scheme, and this is what I want to address today, particularly as regards the pyrrhic, which I remain uncomfortable with. The argument for the spondee in English is strong; as I said, English likes stresses. If you have a foot that has, say, a main verb and its subject "he said," there will always be an argument that both should receive stress. This is even more true if the example were "John ran," because a pronoun demands less stress than a proper name and "said" is one of the least marked verbs in English. Besides that example, there are paired adjectives, or important adjectives with their noun ("dank, dark," or "dark sun") where it can be difficult to claim that either does not deserve the stress, and non-monosyllabic examples where two words demand that their internal stress fall into the same foot: "HE des/TROYED CAI/ro THEN" for instance.
Some would call these "heavy iambs" or "heavy trochees," making the claim that while English likes stresses, it also likes prioritizing stresses, and one of those stresses is primary and the other secondary, so we should properly say that there is an iamb or trochee (depending on which has the primary stress) with a "heaviness" from the nearly equal stress on the "unstressed" word. Personally, I can see that argument for some feet, particularly the feet made up of two monosyllabic words. As I said, pronouns take less stress than nouns; prepositions and articles also tend to be unstressed (see below), some verbs are less marked than others, and so on. But there are also feet, especially the type that involve stresses from polysyllabic words, where marking either of the syllables as unstressed in any way leads to some very strange pronunciation or simply a very odd look to the line and the word.
The case of pyrrhics is similar in this respect: many would call pyrrhic feet what others would call "light iambs" or "light trochees," this time with the "lightness" expressed in the nearly unstressed quality of the "stressed" syllable. However, I have much more sympathy with this view, because of the aforementioned desire English has for stress. As an example, "the man of the dark glen" clearly has an initial iamb, but the other two feet are arguable, depending on how important the glen's darkness is, and whether one feels that "of the" has a stress in it or not. Clearly "of the dark" is anapestic; "dark" gets the emphasis and "of the" are both unstressed. But it is hard to say that neither of "of" or "the" has more stress than the other when they appear alone in a foot together. Personally, I stress the "of" more; articles are really hard for me to stress, unless it's "a" as opposed to "the" or vice versa. Otherwise they are simply unstressed. Prepositions can definitely have importance though, even though they are usually unstressed relative to other parts of speech. And I find this is generally true; most pyrrhic feet have at least one syllable that has more importance relative to the other, and that syllable gets stressed out of English's desire to use stress to enhance meaning. The only exception that I can see is that it is possible to have the unstressed syllables of two polysyllabic words appear together, and even there it would be necessary that neither have the secondary stress inside its word (secondary stress being what happens to the -dor of "conquistador," even though -qui is the primary stress in the word). This is rare.
For this reason, although I will scan with spondees, I will very rarely choose to call a foot pyrrhic. This is probably also a reaction to my instinct to organize lines around where there is stress, rather than where it can be avoided; I will prefer to see meaning in stress reflected in more stressed syllables than in an extra unstressed one. That is not to say that lines cannot be scanned with pyrrhics or that there are not differences in the stress values of "lighter" and "heavier" iambs and trochees, but simply to place where I myself stand in the spectrum.
There are some differences in interpretation, I think, that flow out of whether one calls a foot pyrrhic or weak iamb, or spondee or heavy iamb. A pyrrhic tends to imply that one should hurry over that foot (after all, even though English is stress-based, these names come from quantitative meter, where the lengths of syllables are what matter) while a weak iamb demands that attention be paid to the stress (where I say "iamb" here, the same goes for trochees, but iambs are more common so I'm just writing that with this being understood). Similarly, a spondee is heavier, gives one more pause, and demands that both syllables be understood as important, where a heavy iamb discounts somewhat the degree to which the unstressed syllable carries meaning or weight. All four have their places, and the differences within each pair are rarely dispositive of the meaning or structure of a poem; but the differences do exist, and they are worth carrying in mind when one scans.
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