Iambic Pentameter Rhythm
Sherley
Iambic pentameter (/aɪˌmbɪk pɛnˈtmɪtər/ eye-AM-bik pen-TAM-it-ər) is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in each line. Rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" indicates that the type of foot used is the iamb, which in English is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in a-BOVE). "Pentameter" indicates that each line has five "feet".
Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry. It was first introduced into English by Chaucer in the 14th century on the basis of French and Italian models. It is used in several major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the heroic couplet, and some of the traditionally rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare famously used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets,[1] John Milton in his Paradise Lost, and William Wordsworth in The Prelude.
It is possible to notate this with a "/" marking ictic syllables (experienced as beats) and a "" marking nonictic syllables (experienced as offbeats). In this notation a standard line of iambic pentameter would look like this:
Although strictly speaking, iambic pentameter refers to five iambs in a row (as above), in practice, poets vary their iambic pentameter a great deal, while maintaining the iamb as the most common foot. However, there are some conventions to these variations. Iambic pentameter must always contain only five feet, and the second foot is almost always an iamb. The first foot, in contrast, often changes by the use of inversion, which reverses the order of the syllables in the foot. The following line from Shakespeare's Richard III begins with an inversion:
Besides inversion, whereby a beat is pulled back, a beat can also be pushed forward to create an indivisible 4-syllable unit: x x / /.[3][4][5] In the following example, the 4th beat has been pushed forward:
Another common departure from standard iambic pentameter is the addition of a final unstressed syllable, which creates a weak or feminine ending. One of Shakespeare's most famous lines of iambic pentameter has a weak ending:[6]
This line also has an inversion of the fourth foot, following the caesura (marked with ""). In general a caesura acts in many ways like a line-end: inversions are common after it, and the extra unstressed syllable of the feminine ending may appear before it. Shakespeare and John Milton (in his work before Paradise Lost) at times employed feminine endings before a caesura.[7]
Here is the first quatrain of a sonnet by John Donne, which demonstrates how he uses a number of metrical variations strategically. This scansion adds numbers to indicate how Donne uses a variety of stress levels to realize his beats and offbeats (1 = lightest stress, 4 = heaviest stress):
Donne uses an inversion (DUM da instead of da DUM) in the first foot of the first line to stress the key verb, "batter", and then sets up a clear iambic pattern with the rest of the line (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). In the second and fourth lines he uses strongly-stressed offbeats (which can be interpreted as spondees) in the third foot to slow down the rhythm as he lists monosyllabic verbs. The parallel rhythm and grammar of these lines highlights the comparison Donne sets up between what God does to him "as yet" ("knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend"), and what he asks God to do ("break, blow, burn and make me new"). Donne also uses enjambment between lines three and four to speed up the flow as he builds to his desire to be made new. To further the speed-up effect of the enjambment, Donne puts an extra syllable in the final foot of the line (this can be read as an anapest (dada DUM) or as an elision).
As the examples show, iambic pentameter need not consist entirely of iambs, nor need it have ten syllables. Most poets who have a great facility for iambic pentameter frequently vary the rhythm of their poetry as Donne and Shakespeare do in the examples, both to create a more interesting overall rhythm and to highlight important thematic elements. In fact, the skilful variation of iambic pentameter, rather than the consistent use of it, may well be what distinguishes the rhythmic artistry of Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, and the 20th century sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Several scholars have argued that iambic pentameter has been so important in the history of English poetry by contrasting it with the one other important meter (tetrameter), variously called "four-beat," "strong-stress," "native meter," or "four-by-four meter."[8] Four-beat, with four beats to a line, is the meter of nursery rhymes, children's jump-rope and counting-out rhymes, folk songs and ballads, marching cadence calls, and a good deal of art poetry. It has been described by Attridge as based on doubling: two beats to each half line, two half lines to a line, two pairs of lines to a stanza. The metrical stresses alternate between light and heavy.[9] It is a heavily regular beat that produces something like a repeated tune in the performing voice, and is, indeed, close to song. Because of its odd number of metrical beats, iambic pentameter, as Attridge says, does not impose itself on the natural rhythm of spoken language.[10] Thus iambic pentameter frees intonation from the repetitiveness of four-beat and allows instead the varied intonations of significant speech to be heard. Pace can be varied in iambic pentameter, as it cannot in four-beat, as Alexander Pope demonstrated in his "An Essay on Criticism":
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labours and the words move slow.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th'unbending corn, and skims along the main.
In the first couplet, in phrases like "Ajax strives", "rock's vast weight", "words move slow", the long vowels and accumulation of consonants make the syllables long and slow the reader down; whereas in the second couplet, in the word "Camilla" all the syllables are short, even the stressed one.
Later generative metrists pointed out that poets have often treated non-compound words of more than one syllable differently from monosyllables and compounds of monosyllables. Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase.[18] Thus Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 1:
Nobody knows for certain where this metre came from. However, in the 19th century, the Swiss scholar Rudolf Thurneysen suggested that it had developed from the Latin hexameter.[22] For there is a common type of hexameter which has two stresses in the first half and three in the second, for example:
When the pronunciation of the Latin changed to French, the number of syllables in many words was reduced. For example, illa venit currens "she came running" changed in the vernacular pronunciation to la vint corant, and audite, seniores "listen, sirs" with seven syllables changed to oez seignurs with four. Final syllables in French were particularly subject to being lost, unlike in Spanish and Italian.[23]
Another feature the accentual Latin hexameter has in common with iambic pentameter is that the position of the 1st and 3rd accents is not fixed; for example, the first accent can come either at the beginning of the verse or in second place, as in the pentameter.
Possibly the earliest example of iambic pentameter verse is the poem Boecis ("Boethius"), written in the Occitan dialect of the Limousin region in southern France about 1000 AD.[24] An example is the following extract:
In this metre, every line has two halves: the first half of the line has four syllables, but sometimes after the 4th syllable an extra unaccented syllable is added, as in lines 1 and 3 above; the second half has six syllables.
This optional extra syllable in the middle of the line, as well as an extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line, are also seen in the 11th-century French poem, La Vie de Saint Alexis, of which an extract is as follows (see fr:Vie de saint Alexis):
Also composed in iambic pentameter were the earliest of the Old French chansons de geste of the 11th to 13th centuries. Like the examples above, the poems usually had a caesura after the fourth syllable. One of the oldest is The Song of Roland, which begins as follows:
In this version of the metre as in the poems above, each line has two halves: the first half has four syllables (sometimes 5), while the second half has seven (sometimes 6); in the first half there are two stresses and in the second half three. In some places the final weak vowel -e is ignored, e.g. nostr(e) emperere.
This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born.[25] In both Old French and Old Provenal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables.
There is now often no syntactic pause after the fourth syllable, and every line has eleven syllables. Another innovation common in Italian is synaloepha where a final and an initial vowel merge into one syllable, as in selva_oscura or via_era above.
The first to write iambic pentameter verse in English was Geoffrey Chaucer, who not only knew French, but also Italian, and he even visited Italy two or three times.[24] His Troilus and Criseyde, written in the 1380s, begins as follows, using lines sometimes of 11, and sometimes of 10 syllables. Quite often (but not in every line) there is a syntactic break after the fourth syllable, as in the French poems quoted above:
There is some debate over whether works such as Shakespeare's were originally performed with the rhythm prominent, or whether the rhythm was embedded in the patterns of contemporary speech. In either case, when read aloud, such verse naturally follows an iambic beat. Scholars have explained that there are few stage directions in Shakespeare "because the verse serves that purpose. The dramatic action of the lines is related to the physical action required."[29][vague]
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