"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is an example of iambic pentameter. Each line has five iambs, where an iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.
Iambic pentameter is quite old.
Shakespeare himself wrote in rhythmic pattern.
dum Dum dum Dum dum, the syllables go.
Like a lit'ry heart beat, it is even.
Ten syllables in a line, stress, unstress.
It's quite difficult to discern, I know.
Not always even, but always ten beats.
Iambic pentameter (from Greek: ἰαμβικός πεντάμετρος meaning to have five iambs) 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.
Dactylic pentameter is a form of meter in poetry. The dactyl, which is made of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, is repeated five times to create a pentameter line. In modern poetry, a simple form of dactylic pentameter can be seen in Stan Galloway's poem "Angels' First Assignment,"[1] the first two lines of which read: "Are you still standing there east of the Garden of Eden, or / were you relieved by the flood that revised our geography?"
In classical literature, it is normally found in the second line of the classical Latin or Greek elegiac couplet, following the first line of dactylic hexameter.
The meter consists of two halves, both shaped around the dactylic hexameter line up to the main caesura. That is, it has two dactyls (for which spondees can be substituted), following by a longum, followed by two dactyls (which must remain dactyls), followed by a longum. Thus the line most normally looks as follows (note that - is a long syllable, u a short syllable and U either one long or two shorts):- U | - U | - - u u | - u u | -
As in all classical verse forms, the phenomenon of brevis in longo is observed, so the last syllable can actually be short or long. Also, the line manifests a diaeresis, a place where word-boundary must occur, after the first half-line, here marked with a .
"Pentameter" is a slightly strange term for this meter, as it seems to have six parts, but this name comes from the fact that the two halves of the line, broken here by the , each have two and a half feet. Two and a half plus two and a half equals five, hence pentameter (penta, "five"). The two half-lines are each called a hemiepes (half-epic), from the fact that they resemble half a line of epic dactylic hexameter.
The pentameter is notable for its very structured quality: no substitutions are allowed except in the first two feet.
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Examples of iambic pentameter can be found in a majority of the plays of Shakespeare. Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet are both written in iambic pentameter.
Death stalks in the shadows of all waiting
Pacilantly creeping on the living for claiming
WikiAnswers cannot write a poem for you. The examples in books are perfectly good examples to show you what iambic meter is.
βHad we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.β / Thus begins Marvellβs verse, all sublime, / In iambic tetrameter it does rhyme.
Look at Shakespeare's sonnets, they're usually written in Iambic form.
"And Brutus is an honourable man."
The line "A tree whose hungry mouth is prest" contains eight syllables, making it an example of tetrameter, which consists of four metrical feet per line. Each foot in this line likely contains two syllables, maintaining the tetrameter structure.
iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter is a metrical pattern in poetry consisting of five iambs per line. An iamb is a metrical foot comprising one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Many Shakespearean sonnets and plays are written in iambic pentameter.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
"tetrameter" - it has 4 "iambs"
Yes, "Is and I do love thee therefore go with me" is an example of iambic pentameter because it consists of ten syllables per line with a pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM).
On Sun/day morn/ when I/ woke up/I thought/ I saw/ a yell/ow duck/
Still to be Neat by Ben Johnson is an example of an iambic tetrameter