Iambic pentameter (/aɪˌæmbɪk pɛnˈtæmɪtər/ eye-AM-bik pen-TAM-it-ər) is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama.
The rhythm can be written as: A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row: Straightforward examples of this rhythm can be heard in the opening line of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 12: When I do count the clock that tells the timeand in John Keats's ode To Autumn:[2] To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsIt is possible to notate this with a "/" marking ictic syllables (experienced as beats) and a "×" marking nonictic syllables (experienced as offbeats).
[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.
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.
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).
Percy Bysshe Shelley also used skilful variation of the metre in his "Ode to the West Wind": As the examples show, iambic pentameter need not consist entirely of iambs, nor need it have ten syllables.
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.
Because of its odd number of metrical beats, iambic pentameter, as Attridge says, does not impose itself on the natural rhythm of spoken language.
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.
[15] Linguists Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser developed the earliest theory of generative metrics[16]—a set of rules that define those variations that are permissible (in their view) in English iambic pentameter.
Rewriting the Donne quatrain showing the stress maxima (denoted with an "M") results in the following: The Halle–Keyser system has been criticized because it can identify passages of prose as iambic pentameter.
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] Derek Attridge has pointed out the limits of the generative approach; it has “not brought us any closer to understanding why particular metrical forms are common in English, why certain variations interrupt the metre and others do not, or why metre functions so powerfully as a literary device.”[21] Generative metrists also fail to recognize that a normally weak syllable in a strong position will be pronounced differently, i.e. “promoted” and so no longer "weak."
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: at páter Aenéas, audíto nómine Túrni [but Father Aeneas, when he heard the name of Turnus, ...] or íbant obscúri, sóla sub nócte per úmbram [they were walking slowly, beneath the lonely night through the shadow] The 3rd-century Christian African writer Commodian, who wrote irregular hexameters in a popular style, favoured this kind with five word-accents.
Thurneysen quotes: irásci nolíte / sine caúsa frátri devóto recipiétis énim / quídquid fecerítis ab íllo do not be angry without cause at a devout brother; for you will receive back from him whatever you have done When the pronunciation of the Latin changed to French, the number of syllables in many words was reduced.
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: Bella's la domna, e'l vis a ta preclar, Davan so vis, nulz om no's pot celar; Ne eps li omne, qui sun ultra la mar Beautiful is the lady, and her face is so bright, before her face, no man can hide himself; not even those men, who are beyond the sea.
Of the grief, which the father was showing, great was the noise; the mother heard it; she came running, like a frenzied woman, beating her palms, crying, dishevelled, sees her son dead; falls fainting to the ground.
Charles the King, our great Emperor, For seven full years has been in Spain; As far as the sea conquered the high land.
Dante's Divine Comedy, completed in 1320, begins as follows: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.
It begins as follows: Alcun di Giove sógliono il favore Ne’ lor principii pietosi invocare; Altri d’Apollo chiámano il valore; Some are accustomed to invoke Jupiter's favour in their pious opening verses; others call on Apollo's power The first to write iambic pentameter verse in English was Geoffrey Chaucer, who not only knew French, but also Italian, even having visited Italy two or three times.
[27] His Scottish followers of the century from 1420 to 1520—King James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas—seem to have understood his meter (though final e had long been silent in Scots) and came close to it.
Thomas Wyatt, for example, often mixed iambic pentameters with other lines of similar length but different rhythm.
"[29][vague] The rhythm of iambic pentameter was emphasised in Kenneth Branagh's 2000 production of Love's Labour's Lost, in a scene where the protagonists tap-dance to the "Have at you now, affection's men-at-arms" speech.