How Does Iambic Pentameter Work?

singsong quality. That also makes it easier to memorize and perform, especially when it rhymes a little. To begin to understand iambic pentameter, first consider that there are two basic types of writing, poetry and prose. Before the article. This episode is based on how Stuff Work. Spoke with Paul Voss, associate professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who specializes in Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, and to explain the difference.

He said, simply, rows is the language of everyday speech. By contrast, poetry often has a type of rhythm or beat like a song. This rhythm is called meter. Poems also have verses, which are lines or other groupings of words in a poem, Definitions for the subtypes of verses depend on whether they rhyme and have meter. Rhymed versus both rhyme and have a meter, blank versus don't have a rhyme but do have a meter, and free verses have neither rhyme nor meter. Metered verse is made up

of units called feet. Each foot will consist of stressed and unstressed syllables, not stressed as in oh, I have a deadline and I'm running behind, but stressed as in verbally emphasized or accented. Different types of feet include, for example, the trophy, which consists of one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable. You can hear this in ed Girl, Impose, the raven, and the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain. Another type is the dactyl, which is one

accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones. Meanwhile, as spondi has two accented syllables, and an I am has one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. But when you write a poem in metered verse, you use mostly one type of foot throughout to create a rhythm. This might all sound complicated, but languages like English, how these stresses built in. Think of how the word is languages not languages. The word itself three syllables, one accented and two unaccented,

is a dactyl. The word carrot, for example, is a tropy, and the word describe is an i am a single syllable words can fill in for either a stressed or unstressed part of a foot, depending on the con text. Okay, so iambic verse is metered verse made up of feet that are unaccented than accented. But what about the pentameter part. The prefect's penta is Greek for five, so pentameter means five meter, which means there are going to be five

ft to this meter before the pattern repeats. So a line of iambic pentameter has five ft made up of two syllable sequences that follow an unaccented than accented pattern for a total of ten syllables in each line. A meter can come in different lengths. U trimeter has three ft per line, haptometer has seven, and the different lengths can have different effects. In poetry, Voss pointed out that the lower the number of feet, the more sing songing.

A poem will usually sound higher numbers of feet more closely mimic colloquial English language speech. I think of Jack and Jill, which is in trimitter, versus say, Annabelle Lee, which is in heptameter. To identify a type of verse, you can count the syllables and look or listen for where the accents fall, Just to be careful that you pronounced the words as the writer intended. In the case of Shakespeare, that might mean speaking differently than we do today,

or even just from region to region. I think British versus American English, and sometimes the writer sort of cheats by, say, combining two syllables into one. I think of over versus or in that way, it can be a bit of a puzzle, but it can also help you find what words a poet meant to emphasize. So Shakespeare did write overwhelmingly in iambic pentameter. Take famous Sonnet eighteen, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Though are more lovely

and we're temperate? Ref wins do shake the darling buds of May? And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Back in the late thirt hundreds, Jeffrey Chaucer wrote the Cannabury Tale in iambic pentameter, and he's sometimes credited with inventing it, but it was English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare in the late fifteen hundreds, who first brought iambic pentameter and blank that is, unrhymed first

to the stage. According to Voss, thanks to Marlowe, iambic pentameter became the go to rhythm for both tragedy and comedy, and Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists are known for it, and probably based on Marlowe's influence, Shakespeare chose to have characters speak in iambic pentameter, but not all of his characters did.

Remember that iambic pentameter is more formal sounding, so when Shakespeare wanted to show a less educated character or give the impression of buffoonery, he included limericks and prose as dialogue. But there are many other examples of iambic pentameter from that era. A Pureitan poet and Brad Street used it in to My dear and Loving Husband, published in sixteen

seventy eight. If every two were one, then Shirley we If ever man were loved by wife, then the if ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, you women, if you can. But you don't need to return to the fifteen and sixteen hundreds to find examples of iambic pentameter. Owed to Autumn by John Keats, written

in eighteen nineteen, also used this type of verse. To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel to set budding more and still more later flowers for the bees until they think warm days will never cease for summer has or brimmed their clammy cells. Poets a whole century later used it too, like Robert Frost and his poem After apple Picking from nineteen fourteen, though he mixes pentameter with a few lines of other lengths for a more natural speech sound or for emphasis

or well, you'd have to ask him. Here's an excerpt. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, it keeps the pressure of a ladder round. I feel the ladders sway, is the bows bend, and I keep hearing from the cellar bin, the rumbling sound of load onload of apples coming in. But iambic pentameter has largely fallen out of use today. The majority of today's fiction is written in prose, not verse, and even poetry is often written in prose. Vus said, the novel has obliterated almost every other type

of writing. If you are using iambic pentameter today, it's almost like using a fountain pen. To be fair, I know both publishing poets and people who use fountain pens, but the major exception for iambic pentameter seems to be in popular music. You can find iambic pentameter in songs from the likes of One Direction and Taylor Swift. The day's episode is based on the article Shakespeare wrote an iambic contameter, But what is that? On how stuff Works

dot Com written by Carry Whitney. Brainstuffs production of I Heart Radio and partnership with how stuff Works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.