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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.
Milton's most notable works, including Paradise Lost, are written in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. He was not the first to use blank verse, which had been a mainstay of English drama since the 1561 play Gorboduc.
Like many of the others in the sequence, it is written in a type of metre called iambic pentameter, which is based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions per line. Typically English sonnets present a problem or argument in the quatrains, and a resolution in the final couplet. [2]
Most of the lines are examples of regular iambic pentameter, including the 10th line: × / × / × / × / × / Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride; (80.10) / = ictus , a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus .
with a suitable definition of elision, there are no mid-line extra-metrical syllables; the stresses may fall at any point in the line, although most lines have the standard five stresses, there are examples of lines with only three and four stresses. Thus according to Bridges' analysis Milton was writing a form of syllabic verse. At the time ...
Donne uses an inversion (DUM da instead of da DUM) in the first foot of the first line to stress the key verb, "batter", and then sets up a clear iambic pattern with the rest of the line Shakespeare's Hamlet includes a well-known example: To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
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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.