If you’ve ever read a Shakespearian sonnet, you’ve read several lines of iambic pentameter. If you have no idea what that means, then take some reassurance in knowing that it didn’t stop you from reading the poem, and hopefully it didn’t stop you from appreciating Shakespeare’s skill. To truly understand and appreciate poetry, and especially to write successful poetry of your own, you’ll need a good understanding of things like meter, form and feet. A good basic understanding of these terms is the perfect place to start.
An iamb is a pair of syllables, like “the dog.” When you say or hear “the dog,” the first word “the” isn’t stressed. But “dog” is stressed. It’s pronounced | the DOG |, not |THE dog|. That pattern (the DOG, ba BUM) is known as an iamb. A line made up of nothing but iambs would sound like the DOG the DOG the DOG the DOG, etc.
Pentameter refers to how many feet (an iamb is a type of foot) are in the line. If the following were examples of iambic pentameter poetry, they would read like this:
| the DOG | the DOG | the DOG | the DOG | the DOG
Note that the iamb, the DOG, was repeated 5 times, for the penta part of pentameter. At its most basic, that’s an example of iambic pentameter: 5 feet made up of iambs.
If | the DOG| were repeated only three times, it would be iambic trimeter, four times would make it tetrameter, and so forth. You can find many examples of this type of poetry construction in many poets’ works, but none seemed to use it as often and as freely as William Shakespeare. He used it liberally in his many sonnets, and even wrote lines of dialogue in his plays with this rhythm. And to think, all these years you have been appreciating these great works of literature without even having an iambic pentameter definition. It can only get better from here.
