Iambic Pentameter

Iambic pentameter, the most common and important meter in English language poetry, made its gradual entrance into poetic tradition in the 14th century. Before that time, Old and Middle English poems were primarily written in accentual meter with strong alliteration.

Iambic pentameter is made up of two-syllable units called iambs, in which an unstressed or weak syllable is followed by a stressed or strong one; the iamb is repeated five times in succession, resulting in ten syllables altogether. Like most metrical forms, iambic pentameter can have various effects. In fact, the mark of a poet's distinctive craft was very often his or her skill in varying the standard pattern by adding or subtracting a stressed syllable for expressive effect. In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 19th-century English poet John Keats crafted iambic pentameter to imitate his meaning: “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time…” The overall meter is certainly iambic pentameter, but subtle variations in it produce a different emotional effect for the reader. Keats’s first line ends with two unstressed or weak syllables instead of the iamb (the “etness” of “quietness”), with the effect of thinning, hushing, or quieting sound. At the end of the next line, the poet replaces the iamb with two stressed or strong syllables (a spondee), resulting in the heavier, slower impact of “slow time.”

The Irish writer W. B. Yeats in his 1924 poem “Leda and the Swan“ uses variations on the metrical pattern to create a similarly dramatic effect: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl…” In this Greek myth the god Zeus, taking the form of an enormous swan, descends on a young woman. Yeats’s lines emphasize the overwhelming power of the fantastic bird with three strong beats: “great wings beating.” By contrast, the second line emphasizes Leda's smallness and vulnerability by substituting two weak beats for the iamb’s weak/strong pattern. As a result of this variation we can almost feel the stumble and fall of the word “staggering.”

English Renaissance poets saw iambic pentameter as having weight and force comparable to the meter of the great Greek and Roman epics, longer poems that glorified classical culture. Eager to write epics for their own age, the English poets crafted iambic pentameter to be spacious and flexible enough to make room for complex thought and large-scale action. Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, is said to have invented ”blank verse,” an unrhymed form of iambic pentameter, for his translations of Virgil's Roman epic, the Aeneid, thus compensating for the fact that there are fewer possible rhymes in English than in Latin. Blank verse may be the most widely known poetic form in America, serving as the basis for all of English playwright William Shakespeare's plays. Freed of end-rhyme, blank verse poets tend to create unpredictable sound textures within lines of verse:

. . . and when I have required
Some heavenly music (which even now I do)
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff
Bury it certain fathoms in the sea,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1611)



To convey powerful momentum of thought and action both William Shakespeare and John Milton, who wrote his English epic Paradise Lost in blank verse, used strong enjambments, in which the sentence carries over to the next line. In some of Shakespeare's plays, including Antony and Cleopatra (1606-1607), as well as in some later plays of the Renaissance, the blank verse lines disrupt the iambic pattern so often that the poems verge on free verse—that is, lines with neither a metrical pattern or a rhyme scheme. But these metrical experiments came to an abrupt halt as the Renaissance passed into the 18th-century Augustan age, also known as the Age of Enlightenment. Such English poets as Alexander Pope and John Dryden during this time favored regular meter because it reflected the balance and order they sought in their world.