Page 32 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 3: Major Literary Terms-III

Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, Notes
And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around.
(ll. 190-193)

Alexandrine and Triplet
My Tyrians, at their injur’d queen’s command,
Had toss’d their fires amid the Trojan band;
At once extinguish’d all the faithless name;
And I myself, in vengeance of my shame,
Had fall’n upon the pile, to mend the fun’ral flame.
(ll. 867-871)

3.3 Iambic Pentameter

Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term
describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in
small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called “feet”. The word “iambic” describes
the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The
word “pentameter” indicates that a line has five of these “feet.”
These terms originally applied to the quantitative meter of classical poetry. They were adopted to
describe the equivalent meters in English accentual-syllabic verse. Different languages express
rhythm in different ways. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the rhythm is created through the alternation
of short and long syllables. In English, the rhythm is created through the use of stress, alternating
between unstressed and stressed syllables. An English unstressed syllable is equivalent to a classical
short syllable, while an English stressed syllable is equivalent to a classical long syllable. When a
pair of syllables is arranged as a short followed by a long, or an unstressed followed by a stressed,
pattern, that foot is said to be “iambic”. The English word “trapeze” is an example of an iambic pair
of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables (“tra—peze”) and is pronounced with the
stress on the second syllable (“tra—PEZE”, rather than “TRA—peze”). Iambic pentameter is a line
made up of five such pairs of short/long, or unstressed/stressed, syllables.
Iambic rhythms come relatively naturally in English. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter
in English poetry; it is used in many of the major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the
heroic couplet, and some of the traditional rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare used iambic
pentameter in his plays and sonnets.

Iambic pentameter is meter that Shakespeare nearly always used when writing in
verse. Most of his plays were written in iambic pentameter, except for lower-class
characters who speak in prose.

3.3.1 Rhythmic Variations
In his plays, Shakespeare didn’t always stick to ten syllables. He often played around with iambic
pentameter to give color and feeling to his character’s speeches. This is the key to understanding
Shakespeare’s language.

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