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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.
The Spenserian stanza varies from iambic pentameter in its final line, which is a line of iambic hexameter, or in other words an English alexandrine. In the seventeenth century, John Milton experimented by extending the seventh line of the rhyme royal stanza itself into an alexandrine in "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough" and for ...
Dactylic pentameter; Dactylic hexameter. Golden line; Iambic meter: any meter based on the iamb as its primary rhythmic unit. Alexandrine (iambic hexameter): a 12-syllable iambic line adapted from French heroic verse. Example: the last line of each stanza in “The Convergence of the Twain” by Thomas Hardy. [1] Czech alexandrine; French ...
Lines of poetry made up predominantly of iambs are referred to as iambics or as iambic verse, which is by far the most commonly used metrical verse in English. Its most important form is the 10-syllable iambic pentameter, either rhymed (as in heroic couplets and sonnets) or unrhymed (in blank verse). [35] iambic pentameter idiom idyll imagery ...
Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, usually in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", [1] and Paul Fussell has estimated that "about three quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse". [2]
Related to iambic heptameter is the more common ballad verse (also called common metre), in which a line of iambic tetrameter is succeeded by a line of iambic trimeter, usually in quatrain form. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a classic example of this form. The reverse of an iamb is called a trochee.
Resolution in the iambic pentameter is rare, but it does sometimes occur. When resolution occurs in a weak position in the line, there are two light unstressed syllables between the stressed ones, often within a polysyllabic word, as in the following examples from Shakespeare: [11] This fórtificátion, géntlemen, sháll we sée it? (Othello 3 ...
In languages with a stress accent (accentual verse), it is the equivalent of pentameter with iambs or trochees (particularly iambic pentameter). Medieval French heroic epics (the chansons de geste ) were most often composed in 10 syllable verses (from which, the decasyllable was termed "heroic verse"), generally with a regular caesura after the ...