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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.
Milton's most notable works, including Paradise Lost, are written in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. He was not the first to use blank verse, which had been a mainstay of English drama since the 1561 play Gorboduc.
A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter.Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, [1] and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and ...
Villanelle–A poem consisting of two rhymes within five 3-line stanzas followed by a quatrain. The villanelle conveys a pleasant impression of simple spontaneity, as in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s 'The House on the Hill'. Shakespeare Sonnet 18; Sonnet–A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter with a prescribed rhyme scheme. Traditionally ...
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.
Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable. Usually, either one metrical foot, or a specific pattern of metrical feet, is used throughout the entire poem; thus one can speak about a poem being in, for example, iambic pentameter.
A quatrain is any four-line stanza or poem. There are 15 possible rhyme sequences for a four-line poem; common rhyme schemes for these include AAAA, AABB, ABAB, ABBA, and ABCB. [citation needed] "The Raven" stanza: ABCBBB, or AA,B,CC,CB,B,B when accounting for internal rhyme, as used by Edgar Allan Poe in his poem "The Raven" Rhyme royal: ABABBCC
The Spenserian stanza varies from iambic pentameter in its final line, which is a line of iambic hexameter, or in other words an English alexandrine. In the seventeenth century, John Milton experimented by extending the seventh line of the rhyme royal stanza itself into an alexandrine in "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough" and for ...