Iambic Pentameter
Iambic pentameter is a poetic meter consisting of five metrical feet, with each foot containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (iambic). This rhythmic pattern is commonly used in English poetry and is known for its natural and flowing cadence. It has been widely employed by renowned poets, including William Shakespeare, in their works.
8 Key excerpts on "Iambic Pentameter"
eBook - ePubThe Prosody Handbook
A Guide to Poetic Form
- Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...Greek and Roman poets explicitly recognized this suitability, and used quantitative iambic meter extensively for subjects of less than exalted character: for homely verse, for the lampoon, and for more intellectual satire. The Latin iambus derives from a Greek word meaning “a cripple.” The short syllable represents the lame foot, the long one the foot descending with normal strength, perhaps with the added strength of the cane. EXAMPLES IAMBIC (i) The trampling steed, with gold and purple decked, Chawing the foamy bit, there fiercely stood. (ii) Wherein Leander on her quivering breast, Breathless spoke something, and sighed out the rest. The first passage is from the Earl of Surrey’s translation of the Aeneid, Book IV, and is in unrhymed Iambic Pentameter (five iambic feet to a line) or BLANK VERSE. The second passage is from Christopher Marlowe’s exuberant amatory narrative Hero and Leander. Its lines add rhyme to the Iambic Pentameter, forming a HEROIC COUPLET. Surrey’s meter is highly regular. The only noniambic feet are Chawing (a trochee) and there fierce -, a spondee or an iamb in which the first syllable is a secondary stress. The couplet shows considerably more variation: on is in a stress position but is only very lightly stressed in performance; quivering introduces an extra syllable into the line; the first foot of the second line is a trochee, the second a spondee; and, although in a stress position, is very weakly stressed, while sighed, in a nonstress position, receives good force...
eBook - ePub- G. S. Fraser(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Stress – Syllable Metres THE Iambic Pentameter Most of the greatest and most ambitious English poetry is written in a five stress line of, at its most regular, ten syllables, which can be divided into five feet in which the syllable of minor stress precedes the syllable of greater stress. The most common name for this line is the Iambic Pentameter. It need not be a line of merely ten syllables. If it has a weak or feminine ending, but is otherwise regular, it is a line of eleven syllables like It is possible to substitute in some feet, though not in too many, a three syllable foot for a two syllable foot, and this license occurs even in very regular early blank verse: Måde gló / r oůs súm/m r b / th s sún/ f Yórk The two final syllables of ‘glorious’, in the line from Richard III quoted above, could be considered as contracted into something like ‘gloryous’, and in the printed texts of poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth century there are often marks of elision that suggest they felt uneasy about having three syllable feet. But by the early eighteenth century, what Pope thought (rightly to my mind) his most melodious line has no elision in the foot that gives the line its peculiar melody: See where/ Maeot/is sleeps/ and hard/ly flows Th fréez/i g Tán/å s thróugh/ å wáste/ f snóws. A reader who ignorantly pronounced, or contracted, ‘Tanais’ to ‘Tana’s’ or ‘Tan’is’ would utterly destroy the beauty of this line. These three syllable feet in iambic lines are sometimes called anapaestic substitutions. They scan in the same way as the anapaestic foot, a three syllable rising foot which is scanned thus ° °’. But proper anapaests move at a kind of coarse gallop, as in Byron’s Th ssỳr/ iån cåme dówn/ l ke å wólf/ n th fóld, whereas Pope’s trisyllabic foot ‘-å s thróugh’ helps to slow down the line. Trisyllabic substitution is therefore a better term than anapaestic substitution...
eBook - ePub- Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This may or may not coincide with the measure, or unit of rhythm. In a regular Iambic Pentameter, the basic repeated pattern of syllables is the sequence × /, or the iambic foot: Here the measures, separated by vertical lines, are clearly distinguishable from the feet, marked by horizontal brackets. In a regular trochaic pentameter, on the other hand, the feet and measures coincide: However, it is a notorious failing of traditional prosody that the distinction between ‘rising rhythm’ (iambs, anapaests) and ‘falling rhythm’ (trochees, dactyls) cannot be reasonably drawn when both the initial and final syllable of a line are stressed, or when both are unstressed: Both these types of pattern, which are extremely common in English poetry, could be scanned equally well in terms of iambic or trochaic metre. Analysing into measures, we know there is only one way of distributing the bar-lines: namely, by placing one before each stressed syllable. But analysing into feet, we have to commit outselves arbitrarily in favour of iambs or trochees. The measure is therefore a more reliable concept than the foot in English prosody. The importance of the foot lies mainly in its historical position in the body of theory which poets through the centuries have learnt, and have more or less consciously applied in their poetry. This theoretical apparatus originated in a misapplication of classical metrics to the rhythm of English, and there is reason to feel that despite its longstanding hold over English versification, it has never become fully assimilated. When we turn away from the learned tradition, towards the ‘folk prosody’ of nursery rhymes and popular songs, the metrical foot becomes a patently unsuitable tool of analysis. Harvey Gross uses the example of Old Mother Hubbard in this connection 12 : The important metrical fact about this rhyme is that it is written in three-time throughout, all measures internal to a line having three syllables...
eBook - ePub- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Below I list, with illustrative examples, the major foot structures that can be found with any regularity. Some are much more common than others, the iambic foot being by far the most widespread in English verse. The trochee is reasonably common, and the others are more rare: iamb X / (‘di dum’) trochee / X (‘dum di’) anapaest X X / (‘di di dum’) dactyl / X X (‘dum di di’) It is also possible to get poetic feet which have three light syllables in the remiss position, or where the ictus has a light syllable on either side of it, but these foot patterns are too rare to detain us here. Now let us restrict our discussion for a moment to lines of poetry with iambic ('di dum') feet. Normally, iambic lines will consist of more than one iamb, and poets can choose how many iambs to have as the basic line-template for particular poems. One particular form has dominated English poetry since the fifteenth—century, however, namely a line with five iambs, as in the following example: Example 2 X/X/X/X/X/- Then tooke the angrie witch her golden cup X/X/X/X /X/- Which still she bore, replete with magick artes; (Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, viii, 14) This kind of line is found throughout the verse of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, for example, and is called Iambic Pentameter (literally 'iambic five metre'). We might call the Iambic Pentameter line the metrical norm for English poetry from the fifteenth—century onwards. Other possibilities can, of course, be found: These 'number of feet' combinations can in principle involve any kind of foot as the basic unit, and various stanza forms can have patterns involving differing numbers of feet from line to line (for example, Keats's 'Song', which we analysed in 2.2.7, has tetrameters in the first and third lines of each verse and trimeters in the second and fourth lines). But it is the iamb in units of five which is the dominant English verse form. Exercise 1 (a) Re-examine Keats's 'Song' in 2.2.7...
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...Lines of two, three, four, five, six, or seven feet, are common; and these have received the technical denominations of dim'eter, trim'eter, tetram'eter, pentam'eter, hexam'eter, and heptam'eter. On a wide page, iambics and trochaics may possibly be written in octom'eter ; but lines of this measure, being very long, are mostly abandoned for alternate tetrameters. ORDER I.—IAMBIC VERSE. In Iambic verse, the stress is laid on the even syllables, and the odd ones are short. Any short syllable added to a line of this order, is supernumerary; iambic rhymes, which are naturally single, being made double by one, and triple by two. But the adding of one short syllable, which is much practised in dramatic poetry, may be reckoned to convert the last foot into an amphibrach, though the adding of two cannot. Iambics consist of the following measures:— MEASURE I.—IAMBIC OF EIGHT FEET, OR OCTOMETER. Psalm XLVII, 1 and 2. "O =all | y~e p=eo | -pl~e, cl=ap | y~our h=ands, | ~and w=ith | tr~i=um | -ph~ant v=oi | -c~es s=ing; No force | the might | -=y power | withstands | of God, | the u | -niver | -sal King." See the " Psalms of David, in Metre," p. 54. Each couplet of this verse is now commonly reduced to, or exchanged for, a simple stanza of four tetrameter lines, rhyming alternately, and each commencing with a capital; but sometimes, the second line and the fourth are still commenced with a small letter: as, "Your ut | -most skill | in praise | be shown, for Him | who all | the world | commands, Who sits | upon | his right | -eous throne, and spreads | his sway | o'er heath | -en lands." Ib., verses 7 and 8; Edition bound with Com. Prayer, N. Y., 1819. An other Example. "The hour | is come | —the cher | -ish'd hour, When from | the bus | -y world | set free, I seek | at length | my lone | -ly bower, And muse | in si | -lent thought | on thee." THEODORE HOOK'S REMAINS: The Examiner, No...
eBook - ePub- Eric Weiskott(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
...Chaucer’s use of rhyme-breaking, in which a sentence boundary or strong clausal boundary interrupts the couplet, unifies his poetic output in tetrameter and pentameter. 9 In both meters, Chaucer sometimes employs moderate to heavy enjambment between lines. Its shorter length made the tetrameter somewhat more amenable to this device. 10 In other important respects, Chaucer’s two verse forms differ. Pentameter is not tetrameter + a foot. 11 In pentameter, overlaying the syllable pairs (‘iambs’) visible to classicizing foot-based scansion are two cola, divided by a caesura. To a large extent, the formal differences between tetrameter and pentameter reflect the different cultural lineage of the newer meter. Tetrameter expresses pressure on English from twelfth-century Anglo-Norman/French, whereas pentameter emerged from Chaucer’s highly atypical engagement with fourteenth-century Italian poetry. In a pair of technical studies, Martin J. Duffell shows in detail what Chaucer’s pentameter owes to cosmopolitan metrical culture. 12 According to Duffell, Chaucer transposed to the English language habits of thought learned from consuming French and especially Italian meter. Specifically, Chaucer’s disposition of stress patterns and caesura within the decasyllabic English long line resembles that of contemporary Italian poets. Duffell constructs a typology of eight line styles used in European decasyllabic meters...
eBook - ePub- Philip Hobsbaum(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The tetrameter is a four-stress line, whose ‘beat’ is provided by the syllables that bear a heavy stress, as distinct from those that are lightly stressed. The greatest variety is provided by the iambic tetrameter. This was the chosen mode of two major poets, Andrew Marvell (1621–78), who was best known for his prose in his own time, and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), who is best known for his prose in ours. The range of which this metrical pattern is capable may be seen in the following examples, First, there is the beginning of Marvell’s poem ‘To his coy mistress’: Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down and think which way To walk and pass our long love’s day. Then there is a poem on what seems to be a quite different topic, Swift’s ironic elegy or verse obituary for himself, ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’: The time is not remote, when I Must by the course of nature die: When I foresee my special friends, Will try to find their private ends. Marvell’s love poem rises to a metaphysical contemplation of death, still in this same metre: But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. The poem by Swift, though primarily satirical, has passages of meditation: Indifference clad in wisdom’s guise All fortitude of mind supplies: For how can stony bowels melt, In those who never pity felt? The trochaic tetrameter, on the other hand, is capable of no such variegation. Swift is probably the greatest master of this limited metre, and he uses it mainly to express indignation...
eBook - ePubRoutledge Revivals: Essays on Style and Language (1966)
Linguistic and Critical Approaches to Literary Style
- Roger Fowler, Roger Fowler(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...One is the metre: a skeleton with a few regularly proportioned and articulated parts. It is built up on the basis of one unit, the foot; five feet form a line; lines may be grouped into sets (‘couplets’, ‘stanzas’, etc.) by rhyme. These three units—foot, line and stanza—are identified by phonetic characteristics. The foot has a light followed by a heavy stress; within the line, all light and heavy stresses are equated, giving only two grades of stress. The line is marked off, not only by the number of feet, stresses and syllables it contains, but by certain terminal sound-features: perhaps by a pause, but more probably by a prolongation of its last vowel and/or voiced consonant; often by a change in the pitch of the voice. The stanza is identified by its rhyme-scheme and often by a fall in the pitch of the voice at the end. Some other minor conventions govern the form of the pentameter: for example, the light and heavy stresses of the first foot may be reversed (but not too often); the stresses of the second foot may not. This metrical skeleton has to be filled out by linguistic elements—grammatical and lexical units—which have their own expectations of phonological form: ‘prose rhythm’, the second of the structures I have referred to. English grammar, like English pentameter metre, has a scale of units of different ‘sizes’: morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence, in ascending order of magnitude. These units of grammar have their own stress-patterns which—and this is the whole point of this essay—may or may not correspond with those of the metrical matrix that they are made to occupy. The ends of sentences are inevitably marked by a change in the pitch of the voice; no matter how this is interpreted by different performers, it must occur in some form...
