Why use pentameter

Need help with English Literature? One to one online tuition can be a great way to brush up on your English Literature knowledge. Answered by Laura H. Answered by Alice C. Answered by Lilly C. Answered by Ellie M. The first poems from the English continent are Anglo-Saxon. The alliterative meter of these poems, as argued by some, are a reflection that they too were written to the tune of this or that song. Though none of his poetry survives, Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne d.

What is known to us is related by the ancient English historian Willliam of Malmesbury. The roots of Iambic Pentameter are in song just as meter in every language and culture appears to be rooted in song and music. Arguments over the naturalness of meter are irrelevant.

Iambic Pentameter is no more natural to the English language than the elaborate meter and rhyme of a rapper. Conversely, free verse is not rooted in music but only imitates the typographical presentation the lineation of metrical poetry. Why make this distinction? Meter acknowledges our human capacity to find rhythm and pattern within language as within all things.

However, I will argue that writing meter is to partake in a tradition of poetry that is ancient and innate. I havent read all this. I have scanned it. But I still feel confident to suggest it is an incredible body of work. Please tell me that youre doing more than blogging all this stunning research. Like Like. This is a fascinating read and will inform much of my introduction to Shakespeare for my students.

Thank you so much for the fascinating study and history! And what then is so great about this meter? Just listen to it! Blank verse is my favorite poetic form. When I first began writing it, I had to count out, but it soon became second nature. Perhaps later today I can get back to it.

I certainly hope so. Reading verse was for generations beyond the capabilities of the vast majority. Apart from the priest and the local squire there was no-one to read them. As to Shakespeare, the actors had to memorise the texts. Obviously the big stars, with their long soliloquies, came from a different echelon and had the undoubted ability to read and provided you had the structure, the correct meter, the suitable line length to accomdate breathing, action, etc.

Meter seems to have originated from that reality. Alliteration, rhythm and the Homeric epithet were all or so historians think mnemonic aids. However, by the time Iambic Pentameter was developed other forces were at work.

That depends. Once you got in the country, that obviously changed, but I think you found similar patterns wherever there were urban centers.

You are both right and wrong. What Shakespeare did do was to write blank verse or iambic pentameter. The verse probably did make memorization easier for the same reasons it always had. I think, to be fair, we should own that Shakespeare wrote more rhyme than we give him credit for. I noticed that some of these are songs from the plays.

Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare and penned some lovely songs. William Shakespeare must have been seriously overworked. Apart from writing, running a theater or two, and keeping his sponsors happy he also acted in some of his own plays. He would certainly have contracted out a lot of the more mundane and routine work, and doubtless that included song writing too.

It was impossible for him to do all that he did. No man could have possibly done it alone. I have not been much moved by memorable blank verse written after Wallace Stevens. Poetic souls and hackneyed minds. Thanks for the comment ddby. Wallance Stevens wrote blank verse, to be sure, and some of it quite strong; but you would hard-pressed to call To an Old Philosopher in Rome blank verse. There are simply too many variant feet in too short a space to merit the nomenclature: Blank Verse.

If anything, the verse is accentual as opposed to accentual syllabic. Stevens, in nearly every line, hews to five accented syllables but widely varies the number of unaccented syllables.

He was a strong poet, like Yeats. But to compare this poem, as an example of blank verse , to other poets who actually play by the rules, is a bit like comparing tennis players who play with the net up to another who plays with the net down. Middleton and Massinger Middleton especially.

Philip Larkin, among the relatively recently deceased, and the still living, writing, and widely admired Geoffrey Hill are two important poets writing in English who mostly produced formalist verse. Your assertion that song is the origin of poetic meter is fascinating. Such an experiment could potentially have very fruitful results. Might great poetry be the result? Rhyming was also presumably cued to the end of a musical phrase. Rock lyrics can be a beast of a different color.

Line lengths can be irregular and rhyme non-existent. That said, I just checked out Dylan, Beatles, and Wonder, out of curiosity, and they all show accentual or accentual syllabic meters with rhyme.

Pretty cool. If all poetry prior to the era of free verse were lost, you can see how poets would rediscover meter and rhyme through the lyrics of Dylan or the Beatles among others. History would repeat itself. Such experiments resulted in years worth of poetry.

Pingback: Learning Latin with Jane Austen « theausteninheritance. Just wondering, how would you scan the penultimate line? There are two ways to scan it. The first is hyper-metrically.

In other words, treat the second foot as a variant foot — an anapest:. Crowns what you are do ing in the pre sent deed ,. The third foot is pyrrhic — also a variant foot. So, we have three options:. He was enacting the subject of the speech in the actual flow of the meter. He seemed to overlook what, to us , would be the obvious metrical deviations because, probably, he read them metrically according to the expected conventions of the day — and spent more time complaining about consecutive pyrrhics or spondees.

Each editor will make his or her own educated guess as to what Shakespeare intended. But this last possibility is sheer conjecture. Nevertheless, editors have re-arranged whole passages of prose into blank verse on less or equivalent evidence.

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Pingback: Why do poets use iambic pentameter? How my heart speaks. Reblogged this on How my heart speaks and commented: Good writing and thinking. Pingback: A long and beautiful post about the history and use of metre in poetry How my heart speaks.

Elizabethan poets apparently thought they were imitating the alexandrines of other languages when writing hexameters. So, while they may not be the same, poets nonetheless considered them analogous. The only purpose for the grammatical inversion is to make the rhyme. The post is by Alicia Stallings.

She begins her post by writing:. Of course rhyming poetry is rhyme driven. Rhyme is an engine of syntax. However, she does write:. So, the best advice, as regards Stallings, is to do as she does. Read her poetry. Are the rhymes determining the line and the subject matter, or is the subject matter determining the rhymes? The rhymes feel entirely accidental. The rhymes feel driven by the subject matter; and this is the effect you are looking for.

For the record, I love the SOV construction — especially when done well. Here, for instance, is how Shakespeare reverses the normal syntax of English to convey and build suspense. Hamlet I , ii, Having devised a sentence in more or less normal word order in which the verbs have radically different positions, Shakespeare then resorts to inversion, and the OVSV clause contains, moreover, a peculiar reversal of impart and did. The next sentence places two circumstantial expressions between subject and verb, so that the latter, with its short object, seems curiously postponed, even though the number of intervening syllables is not great.

Finally, in the concluding subordinate clause, both subject and verb are held off until the end. Notice how Shakespeare holds off the apparition comes until the end of the line. Throughout the passage the inverted grammar underpins the feeling of terror and suspense, the feeling of a character whose own thoughts are disrupted and disturbed.

Elizabethans did not talk like this. They spoke an English grammar more or less like ours. Shakespeare can be hard to read because he is a poet , not because he is Elizabethan. Although the use of the SOV construction continued into the 19th century even with a poet like Keats who was consciously trying to shed the feeling of antiquated and archaic conventions , the general trend was toward a more natural speech.

Houston writes:. The importance of SOV word order in subsequent English blank verse is worth noting. Although it is scarcely unexpected that Milton, with his latinizing tendencies, liked the device,its persistence in the romantics can be a trifle surprising. Examples are to be found in The Idylls of the King and seem almost inevitable by the stylistic conventions of the work, but the use of SOV in the nineteenth century is essentially sporadic, if interesting to observe because of the strong hold of tradition in English poetry.

The usage was ebbing. The result is that its use in rhyming poetry stood out and stands out all the more. And now, when the conventional stylistic aesthetic is that of free verse, SVO inversions stands out like a sore thumb. In a recent poem I examined by Sophie Jewett , you will find the following line:. The formulation lashes wet reverses the order of adjective and noun for the sake of rhyme.

This sort of inversion is also common among inexperienced poets. Conveniently moving around parts of speech might have been acceptable in the Victorian era and before, but not now. Normally the present participal, unblinking , would follow the verb stare. This is the way grammar works in normal English sentences. However, for the sake of the rhyme, Hardy reversed the direct object , at the wick, with the past participal unblinking.

The effect is curious. To what is unblinking referring? Is it the stare that is unblinking? Apologists meaning to rationalize this inversion might point out that the syntactic ambiguity is brilliantly deliberate.

Ultimately, one of the most telling attributes of an experienced rhymer is the parts of speech he or she chooses to rhyme. A novice may primarily rhyme verbs or nouns. In other words, the line and sentence will end with the rhyme.

The rhymes of the more experienced poet will move like a snake through his verse. The rhymes will shift from verb, to noun, to adjective, to preposition, etc. In the spirit of put up or shut up , check out my poem All my Telling. Decide for yourself whether I practice what I preach. And here is Alicia Stallings what what is, perhaps, the most succinct advice on rhyme that I have ever read — her Presto Manifesto. The most important statement from her manifesto, to me, is the following:.

There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. There are different forms of pentameter: iamb , trochaic , dactylic, and anapestic. The most commonly used pentameter in English is iambic. It also can be described as a line that consists of ten syllables, where the first syllable is stressed, the second is unstressed, the third is stressed, and so on until it reaches the 10th line syllable. For instance:. Sonnet 18 , by William Shakespeare. That strain a gain!