I struggled through a couple of ill-spoken English profs’ explanation thereof and came up empty. Subsequently I had a bunch of music majors describe some of my writings as such. I think I know the basic rythym, but… can anybody explain iambic pentameter to me in terms I’ll understand?
An iamb is a two syllable beat in which the stress is placed on the second syllable.
Pentameter indicates a metric line of five beats.
Therefore iambic pentameter is a line of five beats (ten syllables) in which each beat is stressed on teh second syllable. Much of natural english speech can be recited in iambs. This is helped by the fact that stressed beats in english can often be shifted without sounding forced.
example:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Further, IIRC, iambic pentameter was considered to be either the most desirable meter for speech or the most high-toned and worthy of being spoken by nobility. This is why folks like Hamlet and Henry V have more lines in iambic pentameter than folks like gravediggers and serving wenches.
When you consider how trippingly it rolls off the tongue, iambic pentameter is the easiest way to get through all that Elizabethan jargon.
“But soft what light through yonder window breaks” is better than “Hey, there’s somebody hanging out in that room up there.”
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
Classic Latin poetry, on the other hand, is written often in dactylic hexameter, as in “Arma virumque cano Trojae qui primus ab oris…”
A good basic poetry book would explain the difference between various types of ‘feet’ in poetry, such as iambs, dactyls, etc.
The traditional sonnet is also supposed to be written in iambic pentameter. (Even e.e. cummings, whose sonnets were not exactly traditional, used it.)
The most famous line in the form is:
“Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?”
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
no, the line is
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?”
From “(the Tragical History of)Doctor Faustus” by Christopher Marlowe.
Another famous line is “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” beginning sonnet 18 by Willy the Shake. Sonnets are entirely in iambic pentameter, of course.