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An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as: da DUM 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:
Related to iambic heptameter is the more common ballad verse (also called common metre), in which a line of iambic tetrameter is succeeded by a line of iambic trimeter, usually in quatrain form. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a classic example of this form. The reverse of an iamb is called a trochee.
The iambic tetrameter was one of the metres used in the comedies of Plautus and Terence in the early period of Latin literature (2nd century BC). This kind of tetrameter is also known as the iambic octonarius, because it has eight iambic feet. [1] There were two varieties. One had a break at the end of the second metron as in Ambrose's hymn.
In some kinds of metre, such as the Greek iambic trimeter, two feet are combined into a larger unit called a metron (pl. metra) or dipody. The foot is a purely metrical unit; there is no inherent relation to a word or phrase as a unit of meaning or syntax , though the interplay between these is an aspect of the poet's skill and artistry.
William Blake used lines of fourteen syllables, for example in The Book of Thel.These lines, however, are not written in iambic heptameter. Four of the poems included by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings are written in fourteeners: "Galadriel's Song of Eldamar," in the chapter "Farewell to Lórien"; the "Lament for Boromir" in the chapter "The Departure of Boromir"; and two in the ...
The Iambic trimeter, in classical Greek and Latin poetry, is a meter of poetry consisting of three iambic metra (each of two feet) per line. In English poetry, it refers to a meter with three iambic feet. In ancient Greek poetry and Latin poetry, an iambic trimeter is a quantitative meter, in which a line consists of three iambic metra.
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 Shakespeare's Hamlet includes a well-known example: To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
There are numerous examples from the 16th century and a few from the 17th; the most prominent of these is Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) in couplets of iambic hexameter. An example from Drayton (marking the six feet on each line): Nor a/ny o/ther wold / like Cot/swold e/ver sped, So rich / and fair / a vale / in for/tuning / to wed.