Как пишется пятистопный ямб

Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called «feet». «Iambic» refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in a-bove). «Pentameter» indicates a line of five «feet».

Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry. It was first introduced into English by Chaucer in 14th century on the basis of French and Italian models. It is used in several major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the heroic couplet, and some of the traditionally rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare famously used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets,^[1] John Milton in his Paradise Lost, and William Wordsworth in The Prelude.

As lines in iambic pentameter usually contain ten syllables, it is considered a form of decasyllabic verse.

Meter[edit]

Example[edit]

An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:

da DUM

The da-DUM of a human heartbeat is a common example of this rhythm.

A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

Straightforward examples of this rhythm can be heard in the opening line of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time

and in John Keats’ Ode To Autumn:^[2]

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

It is possible to notate this with a «/» marking ictic syllables (experienced as beats) and a «×» marking nonictic syllables (experienced as offbeats). In this notation a standard line of iambic pentameter would look like this:

×   /   ×   /   ×   /   ×   /   ×   /

The scansion of the examples above can be notated as follows:

  ×  /  ×   /    ×    /    ×     /    ×   /
When I do count the clock that tells the time

 ×    /   ×    /     ×    /    ×   / ×    /
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

The iamb in classical and English verse[edit]

The term «iamb» originally applied to the quantitative meter of classical poetry. The classical terms were adapted to describe the equivalent meters in English accentual-syllabic verse. Different languages express rhythm in different ways. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the rhythm was created through the alternation of short and long syllables. In English, the rhythm is created through the use of stress, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables. An English unstressed syllable is equivalent to a classical short syllable, while an English stressed syllable is equivalent to a classical long syllable. When a pair of syllables is arranged as a short followed by a long, or an unstressed followed by a stressed, pattern, that foot is said to be «iambic». The English word «trapeze» is an example of an iambic pair of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables («tra—peze») and is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable («tra—PEZE«, rather than «TRA—peze»). A line of iambic pentameter is made up of five such pairs of short/long, or unstressed/stressed, syllables.

Rhythmic variation[edit]

Although strictly speaking, iambic pentameter refers to five iambs in a row (as above), in practice, poets vary their iambic pentameter a great deal, while maintaining the iamb as the most common foot. However, there are some conventions to these variations. Iambic pentameter must always contain only five feet, and the second foot is almost always an iamb. The first foot, in contrast, often changes by the use of inversion, which reverses the order of the syllables in the foot. The following line from Shakespeare’s Richard III begins with an inversion:

 /  ×    ×  /  ×  /  ×    /  ×  /
Now is the winter of our discontent

Besides inversion, whereby a beat is pulled back, a beat can also be pushed forward to create an indivisible 4-syllable unit: x x / /.^[3][4][5] In the following example, the 4th beat has been pushed forward:

x  /   x  /  x    /  x   x   /      /
A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye

Another common departure from standard iambic pentameter is the addition of a final unstressed syllable, which creates a weak or feminine ending. One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines of iambic pentameter has a weak ending:^[6]

 ×  / ×   /   ×  /      /  ×    ×   / (×)
To be or not to be, | that is the question

This line also has an inversion of the fourth foot, following the caesura (marked with «|»). In general a caesura acts in many ways like a line-end: inversions are common after it, and the extra unstressed syllable of the feminine ending may appear before it. Shakespeare and John Milton (in his work before Paradise Lost) at times employed feminine endings before a caesura.^[7]

Here is the first quatrain of a sonnet by John Donne, which demonstrates how he uses a number of metrical variations strategically. This scansion adds numbers to indicate how Donne uses a variety of stress levels to realize his beats and offbeats (1 = lightest stress, 4 = heaviest stress):

 4  1   1  4       3   4  1     4    1   2
 /  ×   ×  /       ×   /  ×     /    ×   /
Batter my heart three-personed God, for you
1   3   2    4      3        4   1    4    1  4
×   /   ×    /      ×        /   ×    /    ×  /
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.
  1  2  1   4   1     4   2      4   1(1)   4
  ×  /  ×   /   ×     /   ×      /   ×(×)   /
That I may rise and stand o'erthrow me and bend
 1    4     1   4      3    4   1    4    1  4
 ×    /     ×   /      ×    /   ×    /    ×  /
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

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 (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). In the second and fourth lines he uses strongly-stressed offbeats (which can be interpreted as spondees) in the third foot to slow down the rhythm as he lists monosyllabic verbs. The parallel rhythm and grammar of these lines highlights the comparison Donne sets up between what God does to him «as yet» («knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend»), and what he asks God to do («break, blow, burn and make me new»). Donne also uses enjambment between lines three and four to speed up the flow as he builds to his desire to be made new. To further the speed-up effect of the enjambment, Donne puts an extra syllable in the final foot of the line (this can be read as an anapest (dada DUM) or as an elision).

Percy Bysshe Shelley also used skilful variation of the metre in his Ode to the West Wind:

×  /    ×    /   | ×     /    ×   / ×      /(×)
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
  /     ×    ×   /  ×     / ×     ×    /     /
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
 ×    /       ×     /     /  ×  ×   /  ×    / (×)
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

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. In fact, the skilful variation of iambic pentameter, rather than the consistent use of it, may well be what distinguishes the rhythmic artistry of Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, and the 20th century sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Several scholars have argued that iambic pentameter has been so important in the history of English poetry by contrasting it with the one other important meter (tetrameter), variously called «four-beat,» «strong-stress,» «native meter,» or «four-by-four meter.»^[8] Four-beat, with four beats to a line, is the meter of nursery rhymes, children’s jump-rope and counting-out rhymes, folk songs and ballads, marching cadence calls, and a good deal of art poetry. It has been described by Attridge as based on doubling: two beats to each half line, two half lines to a line, two pairs of lines to a stanza. The metrical stresses alternate between light and heavy.^[9] It is a heavily regular beat that produces something like a repeated tune in the performing voice, and is, indeed, close to song. Because of its odd number of metrical beats, iambic pentameter, as Attridge says, does not impose itself on the natural rhythm of spoken language.^[10] Thus iambic pentameter frees intonation from the repetitiveness of four-beat and allows instead the varied intonations of significant speech to be heard. Pace can be varied in iambic pentameter, as it cannot in four-beat, as Alexander Pope demonstrated in his «An Essay on Criticism»:

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labours and the words move slow.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’unbending corn, and skims along the main.

In the first couplet, in phrases like «Ajax strives», «rock’s vast weight», «words move slow», the long vowels and accumulation of consonants make the syllables long and slow the reader down; whereas in the second couplet, in the word «Camilla» all the syllables are short, even the stressed one.

The last line is in fact an alexandrine — an iambic hexameter, which occurs occasionally in some iambic pentameter texts as a variant line, most commonly the final line of a passage or stanza, and has a tendency, as in this example, to break in the middle, producing a symmetry, with its even number of syllables split into two halves, that contrasts with the asymmetry of the 5-beat pentameter line.^{[11][12][13][14]} Pope exemplifies «swiftness» partly through his use of contraction: two extra implied syllables squeezed into the metrical template between the first 2 ictuses:-

 /    ×(×) (×)×  /  ×    /    ×     /   × /     ×  /
Flies o'er th'unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Moreover, iambic pentameter, instead of the steady alternation of lighter and heavier beats of four-beat, permits principal accents, that is accents on the most significant words, to occur at various points in a line as long as they are on the even–numbered syllables, or on the first syllable, in the case of an initial trochaic inversion. It is not the case, as is often alleged, that iambic pentameter is «natural» to English; rather it is that iambic pentameter allows the varied intonations and pace natural to significant speech to be heard along with the regular meter.^[15]

Theories of iambic pentameter[edit]

Halle–Keyser[edit]

Linguists Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser developed the earliest theory of generative metrics^[16] — a set of rules that define those variations that are permissible (in their view) in English iambic pentameter. Essentially, the Halle–Keyser rules state that only «stress maximum» syllables are important in determining the meter. A stress maximum syllable is a stressed syllable surrounded on both sides by weak syllables in the same syntactic phrase and in the same verse line. In order to be a permissible line of iambic pentameter, no stress maxima can fall on a syllable that is designated as a weak syllable in the standard, unvaried iambic pentameter pattern. In the Donne line, the word God is not a maximum. That is because it is followed by a pause. Similarly the words you, mend, and bend are not maxima since they are each at the end of a line (as required for the rhyming of mend/bend and you/new.) Rewriting the Donne quatrain showing the stress maxima (denoted with an «M») results in the following:

 /  ×   ×  M       ×   M  ×     /    ×   /
Batter my heart three-personed God, for you
×   M   ×    /      ×        /   ×    M    ×  /
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.
  ×  /  ×   M   ×     /   ×      /   ×(×)   /
That I may rise and stand o'erthrow me and bend
 ×    M     ×   /      ×    /   ×    M    ×  /
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

The Halle–Keyser system has been criticized because it can identify passages of prose as iambic pentameter.^[17] Other scholars have revised Halle–Keyser, and they, along with Halle and Keyser, are known collectively as “generative metrists.”

Later generative metrists pointed out that poets have often treated non-compound words of more than one syllable differently from monosyllables and compounds of monosyllables. Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase.^[18] Thus Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 2:

 ×    ×  /    /      ×  /    ×  /(×)×  /
For the four winds blow in from every coast

but wrote «vanishingly few»^[19] lines of the form of «As gazelles leap a never-resting brook». The stress patterns are the same, and in particular, the normally weak third syllable is stressed in both lines; the difference is that in Shakespeare’s line the stressed third syllable is a one-syllable word, «four», whereas in the un-Shakespearean line it is part of a two-syllable word, «gazelles». (The definitions and exceptions are more technical than stated here.) Pope followed such a rule strictly, Shakespeare fairly strictly,^[20] Milton much less, and Donne not at all—which may be why Ben Jonson said Donne deserved hanging for «not keeping of accent».^[18]

Derek Attridge has pointed out the limits of the generative approach; it has “not brought us any closer to understanding why particular metrical forms are common in English, why certain variations interrupt the metre and others do not, or why metre functions so powerfully as a literary device.”^[21] Generative metrists also fail to recognize that a normally weak syllable in a strong position will be pronounced differently, i.e. “promoted” and so no longer «weak.»

History[edit]

Possible Latin origin[edit]

Nobody knows for certain where this metre came from. However, in the 19th century, the Swiss scholar Rudolf Thurneysen suggested that it had developed from the Latin hexameter.^[22] For there is a common type of hexameter which has two stresses in the first half and three in the second, for example:

at páter Aenéas, audíto nómine Túrni (Virgil, Aen. 9.697)

«but Father Aeneas, when he heard the name of Turnus,…»

or

íbant obscúri, sóla sub nócte per úmbram (Virgil, Aen. 6.268)

«they were walking slowly, beneath the lonely night through the shadow»

The 3rd-century Christian African writer Commodian, who wrote irregular hexameters in a popular style, favoured this kind with five word-accents. Thurneysen quotes:

irásci nolíte / sine caúsa frátri devóto

recipiétis énim / quídquid fecerítis ab íllo

«do not be angry without cause at a devout brother;

«for you will receive back from him whatever you have done»

When the pronunciation of the Latin changed to French, the number of syllables in many words was reduced. For example, illa venit currens «she came running» changed in the vernacular pronunciation to la vint corant, and audite, seniores «listen, sirs» with seven syllables changed to oez seignurs with four. Final syllables in French were particularly subject to being lost, unlike in Spanish and Italian.^[23]

Another feature the accentual Latin hexameter has in common with iambic pentameter is that the position of the 1st and 3rd accents is not fixed; for example, the first accent can come either at the beginning of the verse or in second place, as in the pentameter.

Early French and Provençal writers[edit]

Possibly the earliest example of iambic pentameter verse is the poem Boecis («Boethius»), written in the Occitan dialect of the Limousin region in southern France about 1000 AD.^[24] An example is the following extract:

Bella’s la domna, e’l vis a ta preclar,

Davan so vis, nulz om no’s pot celar;

Ne eps li omne, qui sun ultra la mar

«Beautiful is the lady, and her face is so bright,

before her face, no man can hide himself;

not even those men, who are beyond the sea.»

In this metre, every line has two halves: the first half of the line has four syllables, but sometimes after the 4th syllable an extra unaccented syllable is added, as in lines 1 and 3 above; the second half has six syllables.

This optional extra syllable in the middle of the line, as well as an extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line, are also seen in the 11th-century French poem, La Vie de Saint Alexis, of which an extract is as follows (see fr:Vie de saint Alexis):

De la dolor, que demenat li pedre

Grant fut la noise, si l’entendit la medre:

La vint corant, com feme forsenede,

Batant ses palmes, cridant, eschavelede;

Veit mort son fil, a terre chiet pasmede.

«Of the grief, which the father was showing,

great was the noise; the mother heard it;

she came running, like a frenzied woman,

beating her palms, crying, dishevelled,

sees her son dead; falls fainting to the ground.»

Also composed in iambic pentameter were the earliest of the Old French chansons de geste of the 11th to 13th centuries. Like the examples above, the poems usually had a caesura after the fourth syllable. One of the oldest is The Song of Roland, which begins as follows:

Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes

Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne:

Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne.

N’i ad castel ki devant lui remaigne;

Mur ne citet n’i est remes a fraindre,

Fors Sarraguce, ki est en une muntaigne.

«Charles the King, our great Emperor,

For seven full years has been in Spain;

As far as the sea conquered the high land.

No castle remains in his way;

No wall or citadel is left to break,

Except for Saragossa, which is on a hill.»

In this version of the metre as in the poems above, each line has two halves: the first half has four syllables (sometimes 5), while the second half has seven (sometimes 6); in the first half there are two stresses and in the second half three. In some places the final weak vowel -e is ignored, e.g. nostr(e) emperere.

Troubadors and Italians[edit]

This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born.^[25] In both Old French and Old Provençal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables.

Italian poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante adopted this line, generally using the eleven-syllable form (endecasillabo)^[25] because most Italian words have feminine endings.^[26]: 91 They often used a pattern where the fourth syllable (normally accented) and the fifth (normally unaccented) were part of the same word, the opposite of the Old French line with its required pause after the fourth syllable. This pattern came to be considered typically Italian.

Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed in 1320, begins as follows:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

«In the middle of the road of my life

I found myself going through a dark forest

where the straight path was obscured.»

There is now often no syntactic pause after the fourth syllable, and every line has eleven syllables. Another innovation common in Italian is synaloepha where a final and an initial vowel merge into one syllable, as in selva_oscura or via_era above.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filostrato of the 1330s, imitated by Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde, has a similar rhythm. It begins as follows:

Alcun di Giove sógliono il favore

Ne’ lor principii pietosi invocare;

Altri d’Apollo chiámano il valore;

«Some are accustomed to invoke Jupiter’s favour

in their pious opening verses;

others call on Apollo’s power»

Chaucer[edit]

The first to write iambic pentameter verse in English was Geoffrey Chaucer, who not only knew French, but also Italian, and he even visited Italy two or three times.^[24] His Troilus and Criseyde, written in the 1380s, begins as follows, using lines sometimes of 11, and sometimes of 10 syllables. Quite often (but not in every line) there is a syntactic break after the fourth syllable, as in the French poems quoted above:

The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,

That was the king Priamus sone of Troye,

In lovinge, how his aventures fellen

Fro wo to wele, and after out of joye,

My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye.

Thesiphone, thou help me for t’endite

Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write!

Chaucer’s friend John Gower used a similar meter in his poem «In Praise of Peace.»^[26]: 91 This was written after Henry IV’s coronation in 1399.

Chaucer’s meter depended on the pronunciation of final e’s that even by his time were probably silent. It was soon forgotten that they were ever pronounced, so later readers could not recognize his meter and found his lines rough.^[27] His Scottish followers of the century from 1420 to 1520—King James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas—seem to have understood his meter (though final e had long been silent in Scots) and came close to it. Dunbar, in particular, wrote poems in true iambic pentameter.^{[26]: 105–112}

Later English poets[edit]

In England, the poems of the 15th and early 16th centuries are in a wide variety of meters. Thomas Wyatt, for example, often mixed iambic pentameters with other lines of similar length but different rhythm. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, on the other hand, used a strict ten-syllable line that was similar to the Old French line, with its pause after the fourth syllable, but typically had a regular iambic pattern, and had many of the modern types of variation. Thomas Sackville, in his two poems in the Mirror for Magistrates, used a similar line but with few caesuras. The result was essentially the normal iambic pentameter except for the avoidance of the «Italian» line. It was Philip Sidney, apparently influenced by Italian poetry, who used large numbers of «Italian» lines and thus is often considered to have reinvented iambic pentameter in its final form. He was also more adept than his predecessors in working polysyllabic words into the meter. However, Sidney avoided feminine endings. They appear more often in the work of such masters of iambic pentameter as Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare.^{[26]: 119–127}

Iambic pentameter became the prevalent meter in English. It was estimated in 1971 that at least three-quarters of all English poetry since Chaucer has been written in this meter.^[28]

Reading in drama[edit]

There is some debate over whether works such as Shakespeare’s were originally performed with the rhythm prominent, or whether the rhythm was embedded in the patterns of contemporary speech. In either case, when read aloud, such verse naturally follows an iambic beat. Scholars have explained that there are few stage directions in Shakespeare «because the verse serves that purpose. The dramatic action of the lines is related to the physical action required.»^[29]

The rhythm of iambic pentameter was emphasised in Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in a scene where the protagonists tap-dance to the «Have at you now, affection’s men-at-arms» speech. In this case, each iamb is underscored with a flap step.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called «feet». «Iambic» refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in a-bove). «Pentameter» indicates a line of five «feet».

Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry. It was first introduced into English by Chaucer in 14th century on the basis of French and Italian models. It is used in several major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the heroic couplet, and some of the traditionally rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare famously used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets,^[1] John Milton in his Paradise Lost, and William Wordsworth in The Prelude.

As lines in iambic pentameter usually contain ten syllables, it is considered a form of decasyllabic verse.

Meter[edit]

Example[edit]

An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:

da DUM

The da-DUM of a human heartbeat is a common example of this rhythm.

A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

Straightforward examples of this rhythm can be heard in the opening line of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time

and in John Keats’ Ode To Autumn:^[2]

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

It is possible to notate this with a «/» marking ictic syllables (experienced as beats) and a «×» marking nonictic syllables (experienced as offbeats). In this notation a standard line of iambic pentameter would look like this:

×   /   ×   /   ×   /   ×   /   ×   /

The scansion of the examples above can be notated as follows:

  ×  /  ×   /    ×    /    ×     /    ×   /
When I do count the clock that tells the time

 ×    /   ×    /     ×    /    ×   / ×    /
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

The iamb in classical and English verse[edit]

The term «iamb» originally applied to the quantitative meter of classical poetry. The classical terms were adapted to describe the equivalent meters in English accentual-syllabic verse. Different languages express rhythm in different ways. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the rhythm was created through the alternation of short and long syllables. In English, the rhythm is created through the use of stress, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables. An English unstressed syllable is equivalent to a classical short syllable, while an English stressed syllable is equivalent to a classical long syllable. When a pair of syllables is arranged as a short followed by a long, or an unstressed followed by a stressed, pattern, that foot is said to be «iambic». The English word «trapeze» is an example of an iambic pair of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables («tra—peze») and is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable («tra—PEZE«, rather than «TRA—peze»). A line of iambic pentameter is made up of five such pairs of short/long, or unstressed/stressed, syllables.

Rhythmic variation[edit]

Although strictly speaking, iambic pentameter refers to five iambs in a row (as above), in practice, poets vary their iambic pentameter a great deal, while maintaining the iamb as the most common foot. However, there are some conventions to these variations. Iambic pentameter must always contain only five feet, and the second foot is almost always an iamb. The first foot, in contrast, often changes by the use of inversion, which reverses the order of the syllables in the foot. The following line from Shakespeare’s Richard III begins with an inversion:

 /  ×    ×  /  ×  /  ×    /  ×  /
Now is the winter of our discontent

Besides inversion, whereby a beat is pulled back, a beat can also be pushed forward to create an indivisible 4-syllable unit: x x / /.^[3][4][5] In the following example, the 4th beat has been pushed forward:

x  /   x  /  x    /  x   x   /      /
A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye

Another common departure from standard iambic pentameter is the addition of a final unstressed syllable, which creates a weak or feminine ending. One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines of iambic pentameter has a weak ending:^[6]

 ×  / ×   /   ×  /      /  ×    ×   / (×)
To be or not to be, | that is the question

This line also has an inversion of the fourth foot, following the caesura (marked with «|»). In general a caesura acts in many ways like a line-end: inversions are common after it, and the extra unstressed syllable of the feminine ending may appear before it. Shakespeare and John Milton (in his work before Paradise Lost) at times employed feminine endings before a caesura.^[7]

Here is the first quatrain of a sonnet by John Donne, which demonstrates how he uses a number of metrical variations strategically. This scansion adds numbers to indicate how Donne uses a variety of stress levels to realize his beats and offbeats (1 = lightest stress, 4 = heaviest stress):

 4  1   1  4       3   4  1     4    1   2
 /  ×   ×  /       ×   /  ×     /    ×   /
Batter my heart three-personed God, for you
1   3   2    4      3        4   1    4    1  4
×   /   ×    /      ×        /   ×    /    ×  /
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.
  1  2  1   4   1     4   2      4   1(1)   4
  ×  /  ×   /   ×     /   ×      /   ×(×)   /
That I may rise and stand o'erthrow me and bend
 1    4     1   4      3    4   1    4    1  4
 ×    /     ×   /      ×    /   ×    /    ×  /
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

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 (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). In the second and fourth lines he uses strongly-stressed offbeats (which can be interpreted as spondees) in the third foot to slow down the rhythm as he lists monosyllabic verbs. The parallel rhythm and grammar of these lines highlights the comparison Donne sets up between what God does to him «as yet» («knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend»), and what he asks God to do («break, blow, burn and make me new»). Donne also uses enjambment between lines three and four to speed up the flow as he builds to his desire to be made new. To further the speed-up effect of the enjambment, Donne puts an extra syllable in the final foot of the line (this can be read as an anapest (dada DUM) or as an elision).

Percy Bysshe Shelley also used skilful variation of the metre in his Ode to the West Wind:

×  /    ×    /   | ×     /    ×   / ×      /(×)
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
  /     ×    ×   /  ×     / ×     ×    /     /
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
 ×    /       ×     /     /  ×  ×   /  ×    / (×)
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

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. In fact, the skilful variation of iambic pentameter, rather than the consistent use of it, may well be what distinguishes the rhythmic artistry of Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, and the 20th century sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Several scholars have argued that iambic pentameter has been so important in the history of English poetry by contrasting it with the one other important meter (tetrameter), variously called «four-beat,» «strong-stress,» «native meter,» or «four-by-four meter.»^[8] Four-beat, with four beats to a line, is the meter of nursery rhymes, children’s jump-rope and counting-out rhymes, folk songs and ballads, marching cadence calls, and a good deal of art poetry. It has been described by Attridge as based on doubling: two beats to each half line, two half lines to a line, two pairs of lines to a stanza. The metrical stresses alternate between light and heavy.^[9] It is a heavily regular beat that produces something like a repeated tune in the performing voice, and is, indeed, close to song. Because of its odd number of metrical beats, iambic pentameter, as Attridge says, does not impose itself on the natural rhythm of spoken language.^[10] Thus iambic pentameter frees intonation from the repetitiveness of four-beat and allows instead the varied intonations of significant speech to be heard. Pace can be varied in iambic pentameter, as it cannot in four-beat, as Alexander Pope demonstrated in his «An Essay on Criticism»:

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labours and the words move slow.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’unbending corn, and skims along the main.

In the first couplet, in phrases like «Ajax strives», «rock’s vast weight», «words move slow», the long vowels and accumulation of consonants make the syllables long and slow the reader down; whereas in the second couplet, in the word «Camilla» all the syllables are short, even the stressed one.

The last line is in fact an alexandrine — an iambic hexameter, which occurs occasionally in some iambic pentameter texts as a variant line, most commonly the final line of a passage or stanza, and has a tendency, as in this example, to break in the middle, producing a symmetry, with its even number of syllables split into two halves, that contrasts with the asymmetry of the 5-beat pentameter line.^{[11][12][13][14]} Pope exemplifies «swiftness» partly through his use of contraction: two extra implied syllables squeezed into the metrical template between the first 2 ictuses:-

 /    ×(×) (×)×  /  ×    /    ×     /   × /     ×  /
Flies o'er th'unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Moreover, iambic pentameter, instead of the steady alternation of lighter and heavier beats of four-beat, permits principal accents, that is accents on the most significant words, to occur at various points in a line as long as they are on the even–numbered syllables, or on the first syllable, in the case of an initial trochaic inversion. It is not the case, as is often alleged, that iambic pentameter is «natural» to English; rather it is that iambic pentameter allows the varied intonations and pace natural to significant speech to be heard along with the regular meter.^[15]

Theories of iambic pentameter[edit]

Halle–Keyser[edit]

Linguists Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser developed the earliest theory of generative metrics^[16] — a set of rules that define those variations that are permissible (in their view) in English iambic pentameter. Essentially, the Halle–Keyser rules state that only «stress maximum» syllables are important in determining the meter. A stress maximum syllable is a stressed syllable surrounded on both sides by weak syllables in the same syntactic phrase and in the same verse line. In order to be a permissible line of iambic pentameter, no stress maxima can fall on a syllable that is designated as a weak syllable in the standard, unvaried iambic pentameter pattern. In the Donne line, the word God is not a maximum. That is because it is followed by a pause. Similarly the words you, mend, and bend are not maxima since they are each at the end of a line (as required for the rhyming of mend/bend and you/new.) Rewriting the Donne quatrain showing the stress maxima (denoted with an «M») results in the following:

 /  ×   ×  M       ×   M  ×     /    ×   /
Batter my heart three-personed God, for you
×   M   ×    /      ×        /   ×    M    ×  /
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.
  ×  /  ×   M   ×     /   ×      /   ×(×)   /
That I may rise and stand o'erthrow me and bend
 ×    M     ×   /      ×    /   ×    M    ×  /
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

The Halle–Keyser system has been criticized because it can identify passages of prose as iambic pentameter.^[17] Other scholars have revised Halle–Keyser, and they, along with Halle and Keyser, are known collectively as “generative metrists.”

Later generative metrists pointed out that poets have often treated non-compound words of more than one syllable differently from monosyllables and compounds of monosyllables. Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase.^[18] Thus Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 2:

 ×    ×  /    /      ×  /    ×  /(×)×  /
For the four winds blow in from every coast

but wrote «vanishingly few»^[19] lines of the form of «As gazelles leap a never-resting brook». The stress patterns are the same, and in particular, the normally weak third syllable is stressed in both lines; the difference is that in Shakespeare’s line the stressed third syllable is a one-syllable word, «four», whereas in the un-Shakespearean line it is part of a two-syllable word, «gazelles». (The definitions and exceptions are more technical than stated here.) Pope followed such a rule strictly, Shakespeare fairly strictly,^[20] Milton much less, and Donne not at all—which may be why Ben Jonson said Donne deserved hanging for «not keeping of accent».^[18]

Derek Attridge has pointed out the limits of the generative approach; it has “not brought us any closer to understanding why particular metrical forms are common in English, why certain variations interrupt the metre and others do not, or why metre functions so powerfully as a literary device.”^[21] Generative metrists also fail to recognize that a normally weak syllable in a strong position will be pronounced differently, i.e. “promoted” and so no longer «weak.»

History[edit]

Possible Latin origin[edit]

Nobody knows for certain where this metre came from. However, in the 19th century, the Swiss scholar Rudolf Thurneysen suggested that it had developed from the Latin hexameter.^[22] For there is a common type of hexameter which has two stresses in the first half and three in the second, for example:

at páter Aenéas, audíto nómine Túrni (Virgil, Aen. 9.697)

«but Father Aeneas, when he heard the name of Turnus,…»

or

íbant obscúri, sóla sub nócte per úmbram (Virgil, Aen. 6.268)

«they were walking slowly, beneath the lonely night through the shadow»

The 3rd-century Christian African writer Commodian, who wrote irregular hexameters in a popular style, favoured this kind with five word-accents. Thurneysen quotes:

irásci nolíte / sine caúsa frátri devóto

recipiétis énim / quídquid fecerítis ab íllo

«do not be angry without cause at a devout brother;

«for you will receive back from him whatever you have done»

When the pronunciation of the Latin changed to French, the number of syllables in many words was reduced. For example, illa venit currens «she came running» changed in the vernacular pronunciation to la vint corant, and audite, seniores «listen, sirs» with seven syllables changed to oez seignurs with four. Final syllables in French were particularly subject to being lost, unlike in Spanish and Italian.^[23]

Another feature the accentual Latin hexameter has in common with iambic pentameter is that the position of the 1st and 3rd accents is not fixed; for example, the first accent can come either at the beginning of the verse or in second place, as in the pentameter.

Early French and Provençal writers[edit]

Possibly the earliest example of iambic pentameter verse is the poem Boecis («Boethius»), written in the Occitan dialect of the Limousin region in southern France about 1000 AD.^[24] An example is the following extract:

Bella’s la domna, e’l vis a ta preclar,

Davan so vis, nulz om no’s pot celar;

Ne eps li omne, qui sun ultra la mar

«Beautiful is the lady, and her face is so bright,

before her face, no man can hide himself;

not even those men, who are beyond the sea.»

In this metre, every line has two halves: the first half of the line has four syllables, but sometimes after the 4th syllable an extra unaccented syllable is added, as in lines 1 and 3 above; the second half has six syllables.

This optional extra syllable in the middle of the line, as well as an extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line, are also seen in the 11th-century French poem, La Vie de Saint Alexis, of which an extract is as follows (see fr:Vie de saint Alexis):

De la dolor, que demenat li pedre

Grant fut la noise, si l’entendit la medre:

La vint corant, com feme forsenede,

Batant ses palmes, cridant, eschavelede;

Veit mort son fil, a terre chiet pasmede.

«Of the grief, which the father was showing,

great was the noise; the mother heard it;

she came running, like a frenzied woman,

beating her palms, crying, dishevelled,

sees her son dead; falls fainting to the ground.»

Also composed in iambic pentameter were the earliest of the Old French chansons de geste of the 11th to 13th centuries. Like the examples above, the poems usually had a caesura after the fourth syllable. One of the oldest is The Song of Roland, which begins as follows:

Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes

Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne:

Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne.

N’i ad castel ki devant lui remaigne;

Mur ne citet n’i est remes a fraindre,

Fors Sarraguce, ki est en une muntaigne.

«Charles the King, our great Emperor,

For seven full years has been in Spain;

As far as the sea conquered the high land.

No castle remains in his way;

No wall or citadel is left to break,

Except for Saragossa, which is on a hill.»

In this version of the metre as in the poems above, each line has two halves: the first half has four syllables (sometimes 5), while the second half has seven (sometimes 6); in the first half there are two stresses and in the second half three. In some places the final weak vowel -e is ignored, e.g. nostr(e) emperere.

Troubadors and Italians[edit]

This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born.^[25] In both Old French and Old Provençal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables.

Italian poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante adopted this line, generally using the eleven-syllable form (endecasillabo)^[25] because most Italian words have feminine endings.^[26]: 91 They often used a pattern where the fourth syllable (normally accented) and the fifth (normally unaccented) were part of the same word, the opposite of the Old French line with its required pause after the fourth syllable. This pattern came to be considered typically Italian.

Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed in 1320, begins as follows:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

«In the middle of the road of my life

I found myself going through a dark forest

where the straight path was obscured.»

There is now often no syntactic pause after the fourth syllable, and every line has eleven syllables. Another innovation common in Italian is synaloepha where a final and an initial vowel merge into one syllable, as in selva_oscura or via_era above.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filostrato of the 1330s, imitated by Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde, has a similar rhythm. It begins as follows:

Alcun di Giove sógliono il favore

Ne’ lor principii pietosi invocare;

Altri d’Apollo chiámano il valore;

«Some are accustomed to invoke Jupiter’s favour

in their pious opening verses;

others call on Apollo’s power»

Chaucer[edit]

The first to write iambic pentameter verse in English was Geoffrey Chaucer, who not only knew French, but also Italian, and he even visited Italy two or three times.^[24] His Troilus and Criseyde, written in the 1380s, begins as follows, using lines sometimes of 11, and sometimes of 10 syllables. Quite often (but not in every line) there is a syntactic break after the fourth syllable, as in the French poems quoted above:

The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,

That was the king Priamus sone of Troye,

In lovinge, how his aventures fellen

Fro wo to wele, and after out of joye,

My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye.

Thesiphone, thou help me for t’endite

Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write!

Chaucer’s friend John Gower used a similar meter in his poem «In Praise of Peace.»^[26]: 91 This was written after Henry IV’s coronation in 1399.

Chaucer’s meter depended on the pronunciation of final e’s that even by his time were probably silent. It was soon forgotten that they were ever pronounced, so later readers could not recognize his meter and found his lines rough.^[27] His Scottish followers of the century from 1420 to 1520—King James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas—seem to have understood his meter (though final e had long been silent in Scots) and came close to it. Dunbar, in particular, wrote poems in true iambic pentameter.^{[26]: 105–112}

Later English poets[edit]

In England, the poems of the 15th and early 16th centuries are in a wide variety of meters. Thomas Wyatt, for example, often mixed iambic pentameters with other lines of similar length but different rhythm. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, on the other hand, used a strict ten-syllable line that was similar to the Old French line, with its pause after the fourth syllable, but typically had a regular iambic pattern, and had many of the modern types of variation. Thomas Sackville, in his two poems in the Mirror for Magistrates, used a similar line but with few caesuras. The result was essentially the normal iambic pentameter except for the avoidance of the «Italian» line. It was Philip Sidney, apparently influenced by Italian poetry, who used large numbers of «Italian» lines and thus is often considered to have reinvented iambic pentameter in its final form. He was also more adept than his predecessors in working polysyllabic words into the meter. However, Sidney avoided feminine endings. They appear more often in the work of such masters of iambic pentameter as Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare.^{[26]: 119–127}

Iambic pentameter became the prevalent meter in English. It was estimated in 1971 that at least three-quarters of all English poetry since Chaucer has been written in this meter.^[28]

Reading in drama[edit]

There is some debate over whether works such as Shakespeare’s were originally performed with the rhythm prominent, or whether the rhythm was embedded in the patterns of contemporary speech. In either case, when read aloud, such verse naturally follows an iambic beat. Scholars have explained that there are few stage directions in Shakespeare «because the verse serves that purpose. The dramatic action of the lines is related to the physical action required.»^[29]

The rhythm of iambic pentameter was emphasised in Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in a scene where the protagonists tap-dance to the «Have at you now, affection’s men-at-arms» speech. In this case, each iamb is underscored with a flap step.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Ямб – двусложный стихотворный размер с ударными четными слогами. Его можно назвать самым классическим из наиболее распространенных стихотворных размеров. Стихи, написанные ямбом, известны каждому человеку со школьной скамьи, ведь знаменитые поэты активно прибегали к этой поэтической форме с незапамятных времен.

История происхождения термина

Своим становлением в качестве лирической формы ямб обязан древнегреческому поэту Архилоху (ок. 689–640 гг. до н.э.), но зародился этот размер еще раньше.

Корни ямба – в фольклорных или же ритуальных, культовых песнях древних греков во славу покровительницы земледелия Деметры. В мифе рассказывается, что богиня, в поисках похищенной дочери Персефоны, покинула Олимп и под личиной старухи поселилась в доме элевсинского царя Келея. Единственной, кто смог скрасить горе богини своими шутками, стала служанка Ямба.

В культе Деметры существовал обычай осыпать участников народных празднеств грубоватыми насмешками и язвительными шутками. Они зачастую бывали непристойными и циничными – не иначе как в память Ямбы. Аристотель в своей «Поэтике» отмечал, насколько ямбическая форма сходна с ритмом разговорной речи.

Термин «ямб» – «ἴαμβος» – восходит к музыкальному инструменту «ἰαμβύκη», под аккомпанемент которого изначально исполнялись ямбы. Слово «ἴαμβος» в народном представлении связывалось с шуточным характером произведений.

Как устроена ямбическая стопа

Как уже упоминалось, ямб – размер двусложный. Его стопа (то есть ритмическая группа определенной длительности) состоит из двух слогов: безударного и ударного. Именно в таком порядке: ударный слог – второй. Схематически это можно представить как UÚ| UÚ| UÚ| UÚ, например:

Мой дядя самых честный правил…

Ритмическое ударение оставляет ощущение движения вниз, давления. Слог без ударения – более легкий, словно воспаряющий кверху. Вверх-вниз, напоминает ритм спокойного дыхания – естественный для человека и поэтому легко им воспринимаемый.

Таким образом, ямбическая стопа – это последовательность безударного и ударного слогов.

Разновидности ямба с примерами стихов

В зависимости от числа стоп в строке, стихи, написанные ямбом можно разделить на следующие типы.

Двух- и трехстопный ямб

Двухстопный ямб встречается нечасто из-за своей сложности (чем короче строка, тем тяжелее рифмовать ее так, чтобы она содержала смысл). Один из наиболее ярких примеров – стихотворение «Адели» (1824) А. С. Пушкина:

Играй, Адель,
Не знай печали.
Хариты, Лель
Тебя венчали
И колыбель
Твою качали.

В двухстопном пушкинском ямбе сквозят легкость, изящество, виртуозность. При этом создается впечатление не просто ускоренного дыхания, а как будто бы прерывистого. Кажущийся избыточным безударный слог в конце слов «печали», «венчали» – словно краткая пауза, придающая чеканному ритму ямба звучание вальса.

Трехстопный ямб тоже относительно краток и легко воспринимается на слух. Его быстрый темп хорошо согласуется с шуточными или сатирическими строками. Например, у Лермонтова в «А. А. Олениной» (1839):

Ах! Анна Алексевна,
Какой счастливый день!
Судьба моя плачевна,
Я здесь стою как пень…

Четырехстопный ямб

Средний по длине, разнообразный и ритмически богатый размер. В этой известной всем строчке четыре полноценных стопы и безударный «хвостик»:

Мороз и солнце; день чудесный!
Еще ты дремлешь, друг прелестный… — А. С. Пушкин. «Зимнее утро» (1829)

Четырехстопным ямбом написано множество произведений как в русской, так и мировой поэзии. Классические примеры – пушкинский «Евгений Онегин», цитировавшийся выше, и поэма Блока «Возмездие» (1910–1921):

В те годы дальние, глухие,
В сердцах царили сон и мгла…

Этот размер способен привнести в произведение оттенки трагизма и комизма, масштабную эпику и проникновенный лиризм; может послужить прекрасным фоном для глубоких философских размышлений.

Мастером четырехстопного ямба был и Владимир Высоцкий. К примеру, его знаменитая песня «Кругом 500» написана преимущественно в этом размере (кроме длинных строчек, являющихся шестистопным ямбом):

Пяти- и шестистопный ямб

Пятистопный ямб в русской поэтической традиции встречается регулярно и в разнообразных формах. В XIX веке зачастую использовался с цезурой после второй стопы:

Как изваянная, // висит во сне
С плодами ветвь // в саду моем — так низко…

В. Иванов. «В лепоту облечеся»

В этом примере цезура (ритмическая пауза) отмечена знаком //.

Пятистопный ямб также используется в написании русского сонета.

Последний из наиболее часто используемых ямбических размеров – шестистопный ямб. Это длинный размер, который обычно сопровождается цезурой. В итоге получаются два полустишия, своего рода трехстопный ямб. Некоторая медлительность – причина ограниченного ритмического разнообразия этого размера. Ему свойственны ощущения тягучести, неторопливого ритма дыхания, глубокой думы и лиричности.

Уединенный остров, // чуть заметный в море,
Я неуклонно выбрал, // — золотой приют… — В. Брюсов. «Уединенный остров» (1918)

В шестистопном ямбе написана поэма «Паноптикум» Д. Рудого:

А вот и наш шедевр – знакомьтесь, просто стерва,
Имен не нужно ей: ей жертвы – имена!
Она, быть может, станет в этой жизни первой,
Но в следующей ей вернется все сполна…

Другим выдающимся примером шестистопного ямба является песня Юрия Визбора «Апрельская прогулка»:

Разностопный и вольный ямб

Разностопный ямб характеризуется чередованием длинных и коротких строк и, соответственно, количества стоп в них, например, двух и четырех:

Достигнутого торжества
Игра и мука
Натянутая тетива
Тугого лука. — Б. Пастернак. «Во всем мне хочется дойти до самой сути» (1956)

Существует также вольный ямб, где длинные строчки произвольно чередуются с короткими. Наиболее широко этот размер представлен в русских баснях:

На ель Ворона взгромоздясь,
Позавтракать было совсем уж собралась… — И. А. Крылов. «Ворона и лисица» (1807)

Ямб в русской поэтической традиции

История поэзии демонстрирует, что ямб созвучен дыханию русской речи и ритму русского стиха. Ямб способен передавать полифонию чувств, диалог и монолог, одинокий голос и ропот толпы. Ямбами «Оды… на победу над Турками и Татарами…» Ломоносов выражал восторженное отношение к этому историческому событию. Белинский впоследствии предложил считать именно эту оду началом новой русской литературы.

В поэзии Державина ямб зазвучал уже разнообразнее. Он особенно силен в интерьере и пейзаже. Державинские ямбы надолго станут путеводной нитью русской поэзии, зародят элегическую традицию. Любопытно, что знаменитые строки Пушкина

Старик Державин нас заметил
И, в гроб сходя, благословил

из «Евгения Онегина» также написаны ямбом.

Как уже говорилось, ямб проник и в басню. Крыловские ямбы – наглядное свидетельство того, как органично сочетается народная речь с поэтическими ритмами.

Ямб выдерживает нагрузку не только малых лирических форм. Он с легкостью принимает монументальность «Евгения Онегина» и «Кому на Руси жить хорошо» Н. А. Некрасова. А в цикле Блока с одноименным названием «Ямбы» (1907–1914) отражаются предчувствия неотвратимых перемен, даже катастроф.

Ямб звучит и в творчестве Маяковского (который предпочитал объединять разные стихотворные размеры в одной строке для создания уникальных звуковых эффектов):

А вы
ноктюрн сыграть
могли бы
на флейте водосточных труб?
«А вы могли бы?» (1913)

Ямб в современных русских стихах XXI века

Традиция ямбической формы продолжает жить и в поэзии XXI века. Современный русский поэт Данил Рудой широко использует ямб в своем творчестве:

И жухло жёлтое жнивьё,
И день на убыль шёл, скорбя,
Когда непознанной Её
Не стало больше у тебя.

«Стихи о расставании с любимой» (2012)

Вперед, душа моя, вперед! –
В твоих руках ближайший вечер.
Набрось скорее тонкий плащ на плечи
И устремляйся в свой полет.

«Стихи душе» (2004)

Мы встретимся с тобою,
Лишь путь закончим оба,
Отмеренный судьбою
С рожденья и до гроба.

«Мы встретимся с тобою» (2004)

Другие стихотворные размеры

Хорей

Дактиль

Анапест

Амфибрахий

Metrical feet

Disyllables
˘ ˘	pyrrhus, dibrach
˘ ¯	iamb
¯ ˘	trochee, choree
¯ ¯	spondee
Trisyllables
˘ ˘ ˘	tribrach
¯ ˘ ˘	dactyl
˘ ¯ ˘	amphibrach
˘ ˘ ¯	anapest, antidactylus
˘ ¯ ¯	bacchius
¯ ¯ ˘	antibacchius
¯ ˘ ¯	cretic, amphimacer
¯ ¯ ¯	molossus
Number of feet per line
one	Monometer
two	Dimeter
three	Trimeter
four	Tetrameter
five	Pentameter
six	Hexameter
seven	Heptameter
eight	Octameter
See main article for tetrasyllables.
v · d · e

Sonnet studies
Main
Sonnet Iambic pentameter Octave • Sestet Quatrain • Couplet Volta Sonnet writers
Forms
Petrarchan sonnet Spenserian sonnet Shakespearean sonnet Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets
Variations
Quatorzain • Fourteener Caudate sonnet • Curtal sonnet Demi-sonnet • Pushkin sonnet
Groups
Crown of sonnets • Sonnet cycle Sonnet redoublé Sonnet sequence
How to …
Write a sonnet Write a sonnet like Shakespeare
This box: view · talk · edit

Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called «feet». The word «iambic» describes the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word «pentameter» indicates that a line has five of these feet.

These terms originally applied to the quantitative meter of classical poetry. They were adopted to describe the equivalent meters in English accentual-syllabic verse. Different languages express rhythm in different ways. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the rhythm is created through the alternation of short and long syllables. In English, the rhythm is created through the use of stress, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables. An English unstressed syllable is equivalent to a classical short syllable, while an English stressed syllable is equivalent to a classical long syllable. When a pair of syllables is arranged as a short followed by a long, or an unstressed followed by a stressed, pattern, that foot is said to be «iambic». The English word «trapeze» is an example of an iambic pair of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables («tra—peze») and is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable («tra—PEZE«, rather than «TRA—peze»). Iambic pentameter is a line made up of five such pairs of short/long, or unstressed/stressed, syllables.

Iambic rhythms come relatively naturally in English. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry; it is used in many of the major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the heroic couplet, and some of the traditional rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets.

Simple example[]

An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:

The da-DUM of a human heartbeat is the most common example of this rhythm.

A line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

The tick-TOCK rhythm of iambic pentameter can be heard in the opening line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time

It is possible to notate this with a ‘˘’ (breve) mark representing an unstressed syllable and a ‘/’ (slash or ictus) mark representing a stressed syllable.^[1] In this notation a line of iambic pentameter would look like this:

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

The following line from John Keats’ Ode to Autumn is a straightforward example:^[2]

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

The scansion of this can be notated as follows:

˘	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/
To	swell	the	gourd,	and	plump	the	ha-	zel	shells

The divisions between feet are marked with a |, and the caesura (a pause) with a double vertical bar ||.

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

To

swell

|

the

gourd,

||

and

plump

|

the

ha-

|

zel

shells

Rhythmic variation[]

Although strictly speaking, iambic pentameter refers to five iambs in a row (as above), in practice, poets vary their iambic pentameter a great deal, while maintaining the iamb as the most common foot. There are some conventions to these variations, however. Iambic pentameter must always contain only five feet, and the second foot is almost always an iamb. The first foot, on the other hand, is the most likely to change by the use of inversion, which reverses the order of the syllables in the foot. The following line from Shakespeare’s Richard III begins with an inversion:

/

˘

˘

/

˘

˘

/

/

˘

/

Now

is

|

the

win-

|

ter

of

|

our

dis-

|

con-

tent

Another common departure from standard iambic pentameter is the addition of a final unstressed syllable, which creates a weak or feminine ending. One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines of iambic pentameter has a weak ending:^[3]

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

/

˘

˘

/

˘

To

be

|

or

not

|

to

be,

||

that

is

|

the

ques-

tion

This line also has an inversion of the fourth foot, following the caesura. In general a caesura acts in many ways like a line-end: inversions are common after it, and the extra unstressed syllable of the feminine ending may appear before it. Shakespeare and John Milton (in his work before Paradise Lost) at times employed feminine endings before a caesura.^[4]

Here is the first quatrain of a sonnet by John Donne, which demonstrates how he uses a number of metrical variations strategically:

/

˘

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

Bat-

ter

|

my

heart

|

three-

per-

|

soned

God,

|

for

you

|

˘

/

˘

/

/

/

˘

/

˘

/

as

yet

|

but

knock,

|

breathe,

shine

|

and

seek

|

to

mend.

|

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

/

/

˘

˘

/

That

I

|

may

rise

|

and

stand

|

o’er

throw

|

me

and

bend

|

˘

/

˘

/

/

/

˘

/

˘

/

Your

force

|

to

break,

|

blow,

burn

|

and

make

|

me

new.

|

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 (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). In the second and fourth lines he uses spondees in the third foot to slow down the rhythm as he lists monosyllabic verbs. The parallel rhythm and grammar of these lines highlights the comparison Donne sets up between what God does to him «as yet» («knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend»), and what he asks God to do («break, blow, burn and make me new»). Donne also uses enjambment between lines three and four to speed up the flow as he builds to his desire to be made new. To further the speed-up effect of the enjambment, Donne puts an extra syllable in the final foot of the line (this can be read as an anapest (dada DUM) or as an elision).

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. In fact, the skillful variation of iambic pentameter, rather than the consistent use of it, may well be what distinguishes the rhythmic artistry of Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, and the 20th century sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Linguists Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser developed a set of rules (English Stress: Its Forms, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse, Harper and Row, 1971) which correspond with those variations which are permissible in English iambic pentameter. Essentially, the Halle-Keyser rules state that only «stress maximum» syllables are important in determining the meter. A stress maximum syllable is a stressed syllable surrounded on both sides by weak syllables in the same syntactic phrase and in the same verse line. In order to be a permissible line of iambic pentameter, no stress maxima can fall on a syllable that is designated as a weak syllable in the standard, unvaried iambic pentameter pattern. In the Donne line, the word God is not a maximum. That is because it is followed by a pause. Similarly the words you, mend, and bend are not maxima since they are each at the end of a line (as required for the rhyming of mend/bend and you/new.) Rewriting the Donne quatrain showing the stress maxima (denoted with an ‘M’) results in the following:

/

˘

˘

M

˘

M

˘

/

˘

/

Bat-

ter

|

my

heart

|

three-

per-

|

soned

God,

|

for

you

|

˘

M

˘

/

/

/

˘

M

˘

/

as

yet

|

but

knock,

|

breathe,

shine

|

and

seek

|

to

mend.

|

˘

˘

˘

M

˘

/

/

/

˘

˘

/

That

I

|

may

rise

|

and

stand

|

o’er

throw

|

me

and

bend

|

˘

M

˘

/

/

/

˘

M

˘

/

Your

force

|

to

break,

|

blow,

burn

|

and

make

|

me

new.

|

The Halle-Keyser system has been criticized because it can identify passages of prose as iambic pentameter.^[5] Other scholars have revised Halle-Keyser, and they, along with Halle and Keyser, are known collectively as “generative metrists.”

Later generative metrists pointed out that poets have often treated non-compound words of more than one syllable differently from monosyllables and compounds of monosyllables. Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase. Thus Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 2:

˘	˘	/	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/
For	the	four	winds	blow	in	from	ev-	ery	coast

but wrote no lines of the form of «As gazelles leap a never-resting brook». The stress patterns are the same, and in particular, the normally weak third syllable is stressed in both lines; the difference is that in Shakespeare’s line the stressed third syllable is a one-syllable word, «four», whereas in the un-Shakespearean line it is part of a two-syllable word, «gazelles». (The definitions and exceptions are more technical than stated here.) Pope followed such a rule strictly, Shakespeare fairly strictly, Milton much less, and Donne not at all—which may be why Ben Jonson said Donne deserved hanging for «not keeping of accent».^[6]

Derek Attridge has pointed out the limits of the generative approach; it has “not brought us any closer to understanding why particular metrical forms are common in English, why certain variations interrupt the metre and others do not, or why metre functions so powerfully as a literary device.”^[7] Generative metrists also fail to recognize that a normally weak syllable in a strong position will be pronounced differently, i.e. “promoted” and so no longer «weak.»

Several scholars have argued that iambic pentameter has been so important in the history of English poetry by contrasting it with the one other important meter (Tetrameter), variously called “four-beat,” “strong-stress,” “native meter,” or “four-by-four meter.”^[8] Four-beat, with four beats to a line, is the meter of nursery rhymes, children’s jump-rope and counting-out rhymes, folk songs and ballads, marching cadence calls, and a good deal of art poetry. It has been described by Attridge as based on doubling: two beats to each half line, two half lines to a line, two pairs of lines to a stanza. The metrical stresses alternate between light and heavy.^[9] It is a heavily regular beat that produces something like a repeated tune in the performing voice, and is, indeed, close to song. In fact, a great many songs and almost all jazz music are four-beat. Because of its odd number of metrical beats, iambic pentameter, as Attridge says, does not impose itself on the natural rhythm of spoken language.^[10] Thus iambic pentameter frees intonation from the repetitiveness of four-beat and allows instead the varied intonations of significant speech to be heard. Pace can be varied in iambic pentameter, as it cannot in four-beat, as Alexander Pope demonstrated in his “An Essay on Criticism”:

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labours and the words move slow.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Moreover, iambic pentameter, instead of the steady alternation of lighter and heavier beats of four-beat, permits principal accents, that is accents on the most significant words, to occur at various points in a line as long as they are on the even–numbered syllables, or on the first syllable, in the case of an initial trochaic inversion. It is not the case, as is often alleged, that iambic pentameter is “natural” to English; rather it is that iambic pentameter allows the varied intonations and pace natural to significant speech to be heard along with the regular meter.^[11]

History[]

Latin verse included lines of ten syllables. It is widely thought that some line of this length, perhaps in the Alcmanian meter, led to the ten-syllable line of some Old French chansons de geste such as The Song of Roland. Those Old French lines invariably had a caesura after the fourth syllable. This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born.^[12] In both Old French and Old Provençal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables. Italian poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante adopted this line, generally using the eleven-syllable form (endecasillabo)^[12] because most Italian words have feminine endings.^[13]:91 They often used a pattern where the fourth syllable (typically accented) and the fifth (typically unaccented) were part of the same word, the opposite of the Old French line with its required pause after the fourth syllable. This pattern came to be considered typically Italian.

Geoffrey Chaucer followed the Italian poets in his ten-syllable lines, placing his pauses freely and often using the «Italian» pattern, but he deviated from it by introducing a strong iambic rhythm and the variations described above. This was an iambic pentameter.^[13]:87–88 Chaucer’s friend John Gower used a similar meter in his poem «In Praise of Peace.»^[13]:91

Chaucer’s meter depended on the pronunciation of final e’s that even by his time were probably silent. It was soon forgotten that they were ever pronounced, so later readers could not recognize his meter and found his lines rough.^[14] His Scottish followers of the century from 1420 to 1520—King James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas—seem to have understood his meter (though final e had long been silent in Scots) and came close to it. Dunbar, in particular, wrote poems in true iambic pentameter.^{[13]:105–112}

In England, the poems of the 15th and early 16th centuries are in a wide variety of meters. Thomas Wyatt, for example, often mixed iambic pentameters with other lines of similar length but different rhythm. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, on the other hand, used a strict ten-syllable line that was similar to the Old French line, with its pause after the fourth syllable, but typically had a regular iambic pattern, and had many of the modern types of variation. Thomas Sackville, in his two poems in the Mirror for Magistrates, used a similar line but with few caesuras. The result was essentially the normal iambic pentameter except for the avoidance of the «Italian» line. It was Philip Sidney, apparently influenced by Italian poetry, who used large numbers of «Italian» lines and thus is often considered to have reinvented iambic pentameter in its final form. He was also more adept than his predecessors in working polysyllabic words into the meter. However, Sidney avoided feminine endings. They appear more often in the work of such masters of iambic pentameter as Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare.^{[13]:119–127}

Iambic pentameter became the prevalent meter in English. It was estimated in 1971 that at least three-quarters of all English poetry since Chaucer was in this meter.^[15]

Reading in drama[]

There is some debate over whether works such as Shakespeare’s were originally performed with the rhythm prominent, or whether the rhythm was embedded in the patterns of contemporary speech. In either case, when read aloud, such verse naturally follows a beat.

The rhythm of iambic pentameter was emphasised in Kenneth Branagh‘s 2000 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in a scene where the protagonists tap-dance to the «Have at you now, affection’s men-at-arms» speech. In this case, each iamb is underscored with a flap step.

Examples[]

Poems written in iambic pentameter include:

• Darkness / Lord Byron
• If— / Rudyard Kipling
• Romance Novel / Arthur Rimbaud (English translation by George J. Dance)

See also[]

• Anapaest
• Blank Verse
• Dactyl
• Dactylic pentameter
• Foot (prosody)
• Ragale
• Systems of scansion
• Trochee

Notes[]

References[]

• David Baker (editor), Meter in English, A Critical Engagement
• Robert Bridges, Milton’s Prosody, with a chapter on Accentual Verse and Notes
• Alfred Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat
• Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, McGraw Hill, 1965, revised 1979. ISBN 0-07-553606-4.
• Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry
• Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form
• Leonardo Malcovati, Prosody in England and Elsewhere
• Timothy Steele, All the fun’s in how you say a thing
• Lewis Turco, The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics
• Miller Williams, Patterns of Poetry

es:Pentámetro yámbico
fr:Pentamètre iambique
io:Pentametro
it:Pentametro giambico
pl:Pentametr jambiczny
pt:Pentâmetro iâmbico
fi:Jambinen pentametri

Metrical feet

Disyllables
˘ ˘	pyrrhus, dibrach
˘ ¯	iamb
¯ ˘	trochee, choree
¯ ¯	spondee
Trisyllables
˘ ˘ ˘	tribrach
¯ ˘ ˘	dactyl
˘ ¯ ˘	amphibrach
˘ ˘ ¯	anapest, antidactylus
˘ ¯ ¯	bacchius
¯ ¯ ˘	antibacchius
¯ ˘ ¯	cretic, amphimacer
¯ ¯ ¯	molossus
Number of feet per line
one	Monometer
two	Dimeter
three	Trimeter
four	Tetrameter
five	Pentameter
six	Hexameter
seven	Heptameter
eight	Octameter
See main article for tetrasyllables.
v · d · e

Sonnet studies
Main
Sonnet Iambic pentameter Octave • Sestet Quatrain • Couplet Volta Sonnet writers
Forms
Petrarchan sonnet Spenserian sonnet Shakespearean sonnet Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets
Variations
Quatorzain • Fourteener Caudate sonnet • Curtal sonnet Demi-sonnet • Pushkin sonnet
Groups
Crown of sonnets • Sonnet cycle Sonnet redoublé Sonnet sequence
How to …
Write a sonnet Write a sonnet like Shakespeare
This box: view · talk · edit

Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called «feet». The word «iambic» describes the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word «pentameter» indicates that a line has five of these feet.

These terms originally applied to the quantitative meter of classical poetry. They were adopted to describe the equivalent meters in English accentual-syllabic verse. Different languages express rhythm in different ways. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the rhythm is created through the alternation of short and long syllables. In English, the rhythm is created through the use of stress, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables. An English unstressed syllable is equivalent to a classical short syllable, while an English stressed syllable is equivalent to a classical long syllable. When a pair of syllables is arranged as a short followed by a long, or an unstressed followed by a stressed, pattern, that foot is said to be «iambic». The English word «trapeze» is an example of an iambic pair of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables («tra—peze») and is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable («tra—PEZE«, rather than «TRA—peze»). Iambic pentameter is a line made up of five such pairs of short/long, or unstressed/stressed, syllables.

Iambic rhythms come relatively naturally in English. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry; it is used in many of the major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the heroic couplet, and some of the traditional rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets.

Simple example[]

An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:

The da-DUM of a human heartbeat is the most common example of this rhythm.

A line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

The tick-TOCK rhythm of iambic pentameter can be heard in the opening line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time

It is possible to notate this with a ‘˘’ (breve) mark representing an unstressed syllable and a ‘/’ (slash or ictus) mark representing a stressed syllable.^[1] In this notation a line of iambic pentameter would look like this:

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

The following line from John Keats’ Ode to Autumn is a straightforward example:^[2]

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

The scansion of this can be notated as follows:

˘	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/
To	swell	the	gourd,	and	plump	the	ha-	zel	shells

The divisions between feet are marked with a |, and the caesura (a pause) with a double vertical bar ||.

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

To

swell

|

the

gourd,

||

and

plump

|

the

ha-

|

zel

shells

Rhythmic variation[]

Although strictly speaking, iambic pentameter refers to five iambs in a row (as above), in practice, poets vary their iambic pentameter a great deal, while maintaining the iamb as the most common foot. There are some conventions to these variations, however. Iambic pentameter must always contain only five feet, and the second foot is almost always an iamb. The first foot, on the other hand, is the most likely to change by the use of inversion, which reverses the order of the syllables in the foot. The following line from Shakespeare’s Richard III begins with an inversion:

/

˘

˘

/

˘

˘

/

/

˘

/

Now

is

|

the

win-

|

ter

of

|

our

dis-

|

con-

tent

Another common departure from standard iambic pentameter is the addition of a final unstressed syllable, which creates a weak or feminine ending. One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines of iambic pentameter has a weak ending:^[3]

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

/

˘

˘

/

˘

To

be

|

or

not

|

to

be,

||

that

is

|

the

ques-

tion

This line also has an inversion of the fourth foot, following the caesura. In general a caesura acts in many ways like a line-end: inversions are common after it, and the extra unstressed syllable of the feminine ending may appear before it. Shakespeare and John Milton (in his work before Paradise Lost) at times employed feminine endings before a caesura.^[4]

Here is the first quatrain of a sonnet by John Donne, which demonstrates how he uses a number of metrical variations strategically:

/

˘

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

Bat-

ter

|

my

heart

|

three-

per-

|

soned

God,

|

for

you

|

˘

/

˘

/

/

/

˘

/

˘

/

as

yet

|

but

knock,

|

breathe,

shine

|

and

seek

|

to

mend.

|

˘

/

˘

/

˘

/

/

/

˘

˘

/

That

I

|

may

rise

|

and

stand

|

o’er

throw

|

me

and

bend

|

˘

/

˘

/

/

/

˘

/

˘

/

Your

force

|

to

break,

|

blow,

burn

|

and

make

|

me

new.

|

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 (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). In the second and fourth lines he uses spondees in the third foot to slow down the rhythm as he lists monosyllabic verbs. The parallel rhythm and grammar of these lines highlights the comparison Donne sets up between what God does to him «as yet» («knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend»), and what he asks God to do («break, blow, burn and make me new»). Donne also uses enjambment between lines three and four to speed up the flow as he builds to his desire to be made new. To further the speed-up effect of the enjambment, Donne puts an extra syllable in the final foot of the line (this can be read as an anapest (dada DUM) or as an elision).

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. In fact, the skillful variation of iambic pentameter, rather than the consistent use of it, may well be what distinguishes the rhythmic artistry of Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, and the 20th century sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Linguists Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser developed a set of rules (English Stress: Its Forms, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse, Harper and Row, 1971) which correspond with those variations which are permissible in English iambic pentameter. Essentially, the Halle-Keyser rules state that only «stress maximum» syllables are important in determining the meter. A stress maximum syllable is a stressed syllable surrounded on both sides by weak syllables in the same syntactic phrase and in the same verse line. In order to be a permissible line of iambic pentameter, no stress maxima can fall on a syllable that is designated as a weak syllable in the standard, unvaried iambic pentameter pattern. In the Donne line, the word God is not a maximum. That is because it is followed by a pause. Similarly the words you, mend, and bend are not maxima since they are each at the end of a line (as required for the rhyming of mend/bend and you/new.) Rewriting the Donne quatrain showing the stress maxima (denoted with an ‘M’) results in the following:

/

˘

˘

M

˘

M

˘

/

˘

/

Bat-

ter

|

my

heart

|

three-

per-

|

soned

God,

|

for

you

|

˘

M

˘

/

/

/

˘

M

˘

/

as

yet

|

but

knock,

|

breathe,

shine

|

and

seek

|

to

mend.

|

˘

˘

˘

M

˘

/

/

/

˘

˘

/

That

I

|

may

rise

|

and

stand

|

o’er

throw

|

me

and

bend

|

˘

M

˘

/

/

/

˘

M

˘

/

Your

force

|

to

break,

|

blow,

burn

|

and

make

|

me

new.

|

The Halle-Keyser system has been criticized because it can identify passages of prose as iambic pentameter.^[5] Other scholars have revised Halle-Keyser, and they, along with Halle and Keyser, are known collectively as “generative metrists.”

Later generative metrists pointed out that poets have often treated non-compound words of more than one syllable differently from monosyllables and compounds of monosyllables. Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase. Thus Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 2:

˘	˘	/	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/
For	the	four	winds	blow	in	from	ev-	ery	coast

but wrote no lines of the form of «As gazelles leap a never-resting brook». The stress patterns are the same, and in particular, the normally weak third syllable is stressed in both lines; the difference is that in Shakespeare’s line the stressed third syllable is a one-syllable word, «four», whereas in the un-Shakespearean line it is part of a two-syllable word, «gazelles». (The definitions and exceptions are more technical than stated here.) Pope followed such a rule strictly, Shakespeare fairly strictly, Milton much less, and Donne not at all—which may be why Ben Jonson said Donne deserved hanging for «not keeping of accent».^[6]

Derek Attridge has pointed out the limits of the generative approach; it has “not brought us any closer to understanding why particular metrical forms are common in English, why certain variations interrupt the metre and others do not, or why metre functions so powerfully as a literary device.”^[7] Generative metrists also fail to recognize that a normally weak syllable in a strong position will be pronounced differently, i.e. “promoted” and so no longer «weak.»

Several scholars have argued that iambic pentameter has been so important in the history of English poetry by contrasting it with the one other important meter (Tetrameter), variously called “four-beat,” “strong-stress,” “native meter,” or “four-by-four meter.”^[8] Four-beat, with four beats to a line, is the meter of nursery rhymes, children’s jump-rope and counting-out rhymes, folk songs and ballads, marching cadence calls, and a good deal of art poetry. It has been described by Attridge as based on doubling: two beats to each half line, two half lines to a line, two pairs of lines to a stanza. The metrical stresses alternate between light and heavy.^[9] It is a heavily regular beat that produces something like a repeated tune in the performing voice, and is, indeed, close to song. In fact, a great many songs and almost all jazz music are four-beat. Because of its odd number of metrical beats, iambic pentameter, as Attridge says, does not impose itself on the natural rhythm of spoken language.^[10] Thus iambic pentameter frees intonation from the repetitiveness of four-beat and allows instead the varied intonations of significant speech to be heard. Pace can be varied in iambic pentameter, as it cannot in four-beat, as Alexander Pope demonstrated in his “An Essay on Criticism”:

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labours and the words move slow.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Moreover, iambic pentameter, instead of the steady alternation of lighter and heavier beats of four-beat, permits principal accents, that is accents on the most significant words, to occur at various points in a line as long as they are on the even–numbered syllables, or on the first syllable, in the case of an initial trochaic inversion. It is not the case, as is often alleged, that iambic pentameter is “natural” to English; rather it is that iambic pentameter allows the varied intonations and pace natural to significant speech to be heard along with the regular meter.^[11]

History[]

Latin verse included lines of ten syllables. It is widely thought that some line of this length, perhaps in the Alcmanian meter, led to the ten-syllable line of some Old French chansons de geste such as The Song of Roland. Those Old French lines invariably had a caesura after the fourth syllable. This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born.^[12] In both Old French and Old Provençal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables. Italian poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante adopted this line, generally using the eleven-syllable form (endecasillabo)^[12] because most Italian words have feminine endings.^[13]:91 They often used a pattern where the fourth syllable (typically accented) and the fifth (typically unaccented) were part of the same word, the opposite of the Old French line with its required pause after the fourth syllable. This pattern came to be considered typically Italian.

Geoffrey Chaucer followed the Italian poets in his ten-syllable lines, placing his pauses freely and often using the «Italian» pattern, but he deviated from it by introducing a strong iambic rhythm and the variations described above. This was an iambic pentameter.^[13]:87–88 Chaucer’s friend John Gower used a similar meter in his poem «In Praise of Peace.»^[13]:91

Chaucer’s meter depended on the pronunciation of final e’s that even by his time were probably silent. It was soon forgotten that they were ever pronounced, so later readers could not recognize his meter and found his lines rough.^[14] His Scottish followers of the century from 1420 to 1520—King James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas—seem to have understood his meter (though final e had long been silent in Scots) and came close to it. Dunbar, in particular, wrote poems in true iambic pentameter.^{[13]:105–112}

In England, the poems of the 15th and early 16th centuries are in a wide variety of meters. Thomas Wyatt, for example, often mixed iambic pentameters with other lines of similar length but different rhythm. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, on the other hand, used a strict ten-syllable line that was similar to the Old French line, with its pause after the fourth syllable, but typically had a regular iambic pattern, and had many of the modern types of variation. Thomas Sackville, in his two poems in the Mirror for Magistrates, used a similar line but with few caesuras. The result was essentially the normal iambic pentameter except for the avoidance of the «Italian» line. It was Philip Sidney, apparently influenced by Italian poetry, who used large numbers of «Italian» lines and thus is often considered to have reinvented iambic pentameter in its final form. He was also more adept than his predecessors in working polysyllabic words into the meter. However, Sidney avoided feminine endings. They appear more often in the work of such masters of iambic pentameter as Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare.^{[13]:119–127}

Iambic pentameter became the prevalent meter in English. It was estimated in 1971 that at least three-quarters of all English poetry since Chaucer was in this meter.^[15]

Reading in drama[]

There is some debate over whether works such as Shakespeare’s were originally performed with the rhythm prominent, or whether the rhythm was embedded in the patterns of contemporary speech. In either case, when read aloud, such verse naturally follows a beat.

The rhythm of iambic pentameter was emphasised in Kenneth Branagh‘s 2000 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in a scene where the protagonists tap-dance to the «Have at you now, affection’s men-at-arms» speech. In this case, each iamb is underscored with a flap step.

Examples[]

Poems written in iambic pentameter include:

• Darkness / Lord Byron
• If— / Rudyard Kipling
• Romance Novel / Arthur Rimbaud (English translation by George J. Dance)

See also[]

• Anapaest
• Blank Verse
• Dactyl
• Dactylic pentameter
• Foot (prosody)
• Ragale
• Systems of scansion
• Trochee

Notes[]

References[]

• David Baker (editor), Meter in English, A Critical Engagement
• Robert Bridges, Milton’s Prosody, with a chapter on Accentual Verse and Notes
• Alfred Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat
• Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, McGraw Hill, 1965, revised 1979. ISBN 0-07-553606-4.
• Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry
• Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form
• Leonardo Malcovati, Prosody in England and Elsewhere
• Timothy Steele, All the fun’s in how you say a thing
• Lewis Turco, The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics
• Miller Williams, Patterns of Poetry

es:Pentámetro yámbico
fr:Pentamètre iambique
io:Pentametro
it:Pentametro giambico
pl:Pentametr jambiczny
pt:Pentâmetro iâmbico
fi:Jambinen pentametri

Ямб пятистопный это в литературе

Пятистопный ямб — это что такое?

Ямб относится к двусложным размерам. Ударение падает на второй слог, например:

Ту-маIны — таIялиI и — вновь Iрос-лиI над — луIгом. (К. Бальмонт). Строка делится на несколько одинаковых групп, в которые входит один ударный и один безударный слог. Каждая группа – это стопа.

Ла-зурьI не-бесIна-я Iсме-етIся. (Ф. Тютчев). В этом стихе пять стоп, следовательно это пятистопный ямб.

А счастье всюду. Может быть, оно – этот стих Бунина написан пятистопным ямбом.

В этом стихе пять стоп, следовательно это пятистопный ямб.

Obrazovaka. ru

19.07.2020 12:46:03

2020-07-19 12:46:03

Источники:

Https://obrazovaka. ru/question/pyatistopnyj-yamb-eto-chto-takoe-78800

Ямб и хорей: определение, особенности, примеры стихов; используемые размеры отличия » /> » /> .keyword { color: red; } Ямб пятистопный это в литературе

Ямб и хорей

Ямб и хорей

Размер – это сочетание в стихотворении ударных и безударных звуков, расположенное в определенной последовательности. Без него любое поэтическое произведение воспринимать было бы очень сложно.

Размер — это внутренний пульс, он помогает восприятию стиха. Бывает разный: сонный, энергичный, яростный и нежный. Под определенное настроение поэтом выбирается нужный размер.

Благодаря поэтическим мастерам XVIII века Тредиаковскому и Ломоносову в нашем языке установилось силлабо-тоническое стихосложение, где чередуются ударные и безударные слоги.

2. Популярные и часто используемые размеры

Поэты чаще всего используют в своем творчестве ямб, хорей, также дактиль, амфибрахий и анапест.

Здесь тоже существуют свои разновидности:

Двусложные (состоящие из слов в два слога): хорей и ямб; Трехсложные: дактиль, анапест, амфибрахий.

Сегодня мы исследуем два самых простых размера.

3. Особенности ямба

Ямб (от греч. слова ямбос – музыкальный инструмент) — бодрый, энергичный, ественный и быстрый, строгий двусложный размер с ударением на втором слоге (второй, червертый, шестой и так далее). Схематичное его изображение таково: – / – /– /– /

Его специфика: открытость, разносторонность и многогранность; популярен у большинства русских поэтов.

Возьмем, к примеру, классическое творение гениального Михаила Лермонтова:

Я видел вас: холмы и нивы,
Разнообразных гор кусты,
Природы дикой красоты.

Это четырехстопный ямб.

Вот великолепный образец четырехстопного ямба от корифея поэзии Александра Пушкина:

Я помню чудное мгновенье –
Передо мной явилась ты,
Как мимолетное виденье,
Как гений чистой красоты.

Итак, если ударение на четном слоге, то это — ямб.

4. Особенности хорея

Слово образовано от греческого хорейос, что означает “круговой танец”. Это двусложный размер, легкий и стремительный. Ударение на первый слог. Схематичное его изображение таково: — — — —.

Песенный, элегический хорей был одним из любимых размеров несравненного лирика Сергея Есенина. В его цикле «Персидские мотивы» чаще всего используется пятистопный хорей:

Или снова, сколько ни спроси я,
Для тебя навеки дела нет,
Что в далеком имени — Россия,
Я известный, признанный поэт.

5. «Не мог он ямба от хорея…»: сравнение размеров

В знаменитом романе в стихах «Евгений Онегин» главный герой испытывает затруднение, путая два размера — ямб и хорей. Давайте их сравним. Это двухсложные размеры. Основное различие между ними в ударении: у одного на четные (ямб), у второго — на нечетные (хорей).

Попробуйте определить размер следующего стихотворения Александра Пушкина:

“Всё моё”, — сказало злато;
“Всё моё”, — сказал булат.
“Всё куплю”, — сказало злато;
“Всё возьму”, — сказал булат.

Взяв в руки карандаш, начертите его схему.

Конечно же, это четырехстопный хорей.

6. Выводы

Не нужно бояться стихотворных размеров и считать их чем-то чересчур сложным. Все дело в практике. Интересная задача для начинающего поэта: написать стихотворение определенным размером, сохраняя его на протяжении всего стиха. Попробуйте – может, именно у вас получится.

Популярные и часто используемые размеры

Поэты чаще всего используют в своем творчестве ямб, хорей, также дактиль, амфибрахий и анапест.

Здесь тоже существуют свои разновидности:

Двусложные (состоящие из слов в два слога): хорей и ямб; Трехсложные: дактиль, анапест, амфибрахий.

Сегодня мы исследуем два самых простых размера.

Бывает разный сонный, энергичный, яростный и нежный.

Reshator. com

15.05.2017 23:43:15

2017-05-15 23:43:15

Источники:

Https://reshator. com/sprav/literatura/teorija/6-klass/yamb-horej/

Ямб – что это такое в литературе » /> » /> .keyword { color: red; } Ямб пятистопный это в литературе

Ямб пятистопный это в литературе

Ямб пятистопный это в литературе

Средняя оценка: 4.3

Всего получено оценок: 242.

Средняя оценка: 4.3

Всего получено оценок: 242.

Ямб наряду с хореем является двусложным стихотворным размером, который используется во множестве стихотворных произведениях. Так что такое ямб в литературе, и чем он отличается от других стоп?

Определение и характеристика

Ямб – стихотворный метр. Стопа, состоящая из двух слогов, где ударными являются 2, 4, 6, 8-й и т. д. слоги, например, в стихотворении Ф. Тютчева “Весенняя гроза”.

Таким образом в ямбе всегда первый слог является безударным, а второй – ударным. В хорее все совсем наоборот: здесь первый слог ударный, а второй – безударный.

Кроме ямба существует еще 4 стихотворных размера: хорей, дактиль, амфибрахий, анапест

Ямб может быть трехстопным, четырехстопным, пятистопным, шестистопным. Трехстопный ямб по звучанию очень прост и лаконичен. Его часто используют в сатирических и юмористических произведениях. Ямб из четырех стоп часто встречается в лирических и эпических произведениях. Он очень часто встречается в стихотворениях для детей. Например, в текстах А. С. Пушкина:

У лукоморья дуб зеленый;
Златая цепь на дубе том:
И днем и ночью кот ученый
Всё ходит по цепи кругом; («Руслан и Людмила»)

Пятистопный ямб характерен для лирических и драматических произведений 19-20 веков. Но в поэзии он также популярен и имеет место быть. Например стихотворение А. С. Пушкина:

Четырестопный ямб мне надоел:
Им пишет всякий. Мальчикам в забаву Пора б его оставить.
Я хотел Давным-давно приняться за октаву. («Домик в Коломне»)

Шестистопным ямбом писались произведения 18 века.

Самыми известными представителями, использующими ямб из шести стоп являлись М. Ломоносов и Г. Державин.

Что мы узнали?

Данная статья поможет школьникам запомнить такой стихотворный размер, как ямб, а также запомнить его отличия от других размеров.

Что мы узнали.

Obrazovaka. ru

22.12.2020 5:43:23

2020-12-22 05:43:23

Источники:

Https://obrazovaka. ru/literatura/yamb. html

Ямб – это первое, что приходит в голову при вопросе о стихотворном размере или метре. Неудивительно, ведь очень значительный пласт произведений русской поэзии и не только, написан именно этим метром.

Само понятие пришло в русский язык из греческого. Слово «iambos» предположительно происходит от названия древнего музыкального инструмента. Другие исследователи связывают слово с именем одной из служанок царя Келея, которой по преданию удалось утешить и развеселить горюющую по дочери богиню Деметру.

В литературоведении под ямбом понимают стихотворную стопу, содержащую два слога, первый из которых является безударным, а второй – ударным. Представив стопу в виде схемы, где знаком «!» обозначается ударный слог, а «_» – безударный, получим такой вид:

_ !

Соответственно, если говорить о размерах, то схема двухстопного ямба будет такой: _ ! _ !

Трёхстопный ямб: _ ! _ ! _ !

Стоит отметить, что эти размеры являются редкими и применяются чаще всего в стихотворениях для детей. Вот пример такого стиха:

На| парад
Идёт| отряд.

«Барабан», А. Л. Барто.

Четырёхстопный ямб: _ ! _ ! _ ! _ !

Пятистопный ямб: _ ! _ ! _ ! _ ! _ !

Шестистопный ямб: _ ! _ ! _ ! _ ! _ ! _ !

Наиболее употребительными в русском стихосложении считаются четырёх-, пяти– и шестистопные ямбы. Действительно, если обратиться, например, к поэзии Золотого века. то мы обнаружим, что очень много произведений создано именно такими размерами. Известно, что из-под пера одного только Александра Сергеевича Пушкина вышло не менее 30000 стихотворений, написанных ямбом. Приведём несколько примеров.

Цари|ца го|лосом| и взо|ром
Свой пыш|ный о|живля|ла пир,
Все, Кле|опат|ру сла|вя хо|ром,
В ней при|знава|я свой| кумир,
Шумя|, текли| к её| престо|лу,
Но вдруг| над ча|шей зо|лотой
Она заду|малась| – и до|лу
Поник|ла див|ною| главой.

«Клеопатра». (размер – четырёхстопный ямб)

Увы!| Язык| любви| болтливый,
Язык| непол|ный и| простой,
Свое|ю про|зой не|ради|вой
Тебе| доку|чен, ан|гел мой.
Но сла|док у|ху ми|лой де|вы
Често|люби|вый А|поллон.
Ей ми|лы мер|ные| напе|вы,
Ей сла|док риф|мы гор|дый звон.

«Увы! Язык любви болтливый…». (размер – четырёхстопный ямб)

Движе|нья нет|, сказал |мудрец |брадатый.
Другой |смолчал |и стал| пред ним| ходить.
Сильне|е бы |не мог| он воз|разить;
Хвали|ли все| ответ |замыс|лова|тый.
Но, гос|пода|, забав|ный слу|чай сей
Другой |пример| на па|мять мне| приво|дит:
Ведь каж|дый день| пред на|ми солн|це хо|дит,
Одна|ко ж прав| упря|мый Га|лилей.

«Движение». (размер – пятистопный ямб)

Встречаем четырёхстопный ямб в стихах страстного поклонника пушкинского таланта Михаила Юрьевича Лермонтова:

Пускай |поэ|та об|виня|ет
Насмеш|ливый|, безум|ный свет,
Никто| ему |не по|меша|ет,
Он не| услы|шит мой| ответ.
Я сам| собо|ю жил| доны|не,
Свобод|но мчит|ся песнь| моя,
Как пти|ца ди|кая| в пусты|не,
Как вдаль| по о|зеру| ладья.

«Пускай поэта обвиняет…».

Вот написанные пятистопным ямбом строки поэта, предвосхитившего Золотой век:

Седящ|, увен|чан осо|кою,
В тени| разве|систых| древес,
На ур|ну об|легшись| руко|ю,
Явля|ющий| лице |небес
Прекрас|ный ви|жу я| источ|ник.

Источ|ник шум|ный и| прозрач|ный,
Теку|щий с гор|ной вы|соты,
Луга| поя|щий, до|лы злач|ны,
Кропя|щий пер|лами| цветы,
О, коль |ты мне| прия|тен зришь|ся!

«Ключ», Г. Р. Державин.

Современник и большой друг А. С. Пушкина, Пётр Андреевич Вяземский, в следующем стихотворении пользовался шестистопным ямбом:

Пусть неж|ный ба|ловень| полу|денной| приро|ды,
Где тень| души|стее|, красно|речи|вей во|ды,
Улыб|ку пер|вую| привет|ствует |весны!
Сын пас|мурных| небес| полу|ночной| страны,
Обык|ший к свис|ту вьюг| и рё|ву не|пого|ды,
Привет|ствую ду|шой и пес|нью пер|вый снег.

«Первый снег».

Поэты Серебряного века также применяли ямб для создания прекрасных произведений. Вот стихи символиста Андрея Белого, в которых чувствуется новаторский дух.

Мои| слова| – жемчуж|ный во|домет,
средь лун|ных снов| бесцель|ный,
но вспененный, –
каприз|ной пти|цы лёт,
тума|ном за|несён|ный.
Мои| мечты| – вздыха|ющий| обман,
ледник |застыв|ших слёз|, зарёй |горя|щий –
безум|ный ве|ликан.

«Мои слова».

Здесь видим неравномерность строк: количество стоп неодинаково, имеются паузы. Но это придаёт стихотворению живость и оригинальность.

Вот нежные стихи Марины Цветаевой.

О, пер|вый бал| – само|обман!
Как пер|вая| глава| рома|на,
Что по| оши|бке де|тям дан,
Его| просив|шим слиш|ком ра|но…

«Первый бал».

Использование четырёхстопного ямба придаёт им сходство с классической поэзией XIX века.

Похоже звучат и строки произведения Анны Ахматовой, в которых видим шестистопный ямб:

А! э|то сно|ва ты|. Не от|роком| влюблён|ным,
Но му|жем дер|зостным|, суро|вым, не|преклон|ным
Ты в э|тот дом| вошёл| и на| меня| глядишь.
Страшна| моей| душе| предгро|зова|я тишь.

«А! Это снова ты. Не отроком влюблённым…»

Интересно, что поэтесса здесь нарочно использует несколько устаревшую лексику, что только подчёркивает это обращение к прошлому.

Иван Алексеевич Бунин создаёт в своём стихотворении, написанном четырёхстопным ямбом, удивительно изящный и нежный пейзаж. Упоминание Терека, реки, любимой и Лермонтовым, и Пушкиным, также отсылает читателя к «золотой эпохе» русской поэзии.

Цветёт| жасмин|. Зелён|ой ча|щей
Иду| над Те|реком| с утра.
Вдали,| меж гор |– простой|, блестя|щий
И чёт|кий ко|нус се|ребра.

«Жасмин».

Даже такие экспериментаторы, как Владимир Владимирович Маяковский, пользовались ямбом при создании своих произведений. Вот отрывок из стихотворения «Юбилейное»:

..вот
   и любви пришел каюк,
дорогой Владим Владимыч.
Нет,
    не ста|рость э|тому и|мя!
Тушу|
    |вперед |стремя|,
я
 с у|доволь|ствием
                справлюсь с двои|ми…

Авторы середины и конца XX века также применяли этот метр в своём творчестве. В обоих отрывках, приведённых ниже, видим пятистопный ямб.

Когда|, забыв| прися|гу, по|верну|ли
В бою| два ав|томат|чика| назад,
Догна|ли их| две ма|леньки|е пу|ли –
Всегда |стрелял |без про|маха| комбат.

«Комбат», Ю. В. Друнина.

Уже |рассвет| темнее|ет с трёх| сторон,
а всё| руке| недо|стаёт |отва|ги,
чтобы| пробить|ся к бе|лизне |бума|ги
сквозь воз|дух, за|твердев|ший над| столом.

«Ночь», Б. А. Ахмадулина.

У современных поэтов тоже можно встретить в стихотворениях ямб. Вот несколько примеров использования четырёхстопного ямба:

Среди| путей|, вручён|ных серд|цу,
есть путь|, проби|тый в о|ны дни:
пере|селен|цы, по|горель|цы
и все|, кто хо|дит, как| они…

«Легенда вторая», О. А. Седакова.

Восста|ла на| людей| приро|да,
Как со|общил| прокля|тый я|щик.
Растёт| двуо|кись уг|леро|да,
И ё|жики| не впа|ли в спяч|ку.

«Крещенский романс 2007», В. О. Емелин.

Рассмотрев основные периоды развития русской поэзии, обнаруживаем, что ямбический метр успешно использовался во все времена и применяется по сей день.