What is Iambic Pentameter?

Iambic pentameter is a meter composed of five iambic feet. This explanation may raise more questions, so let’s break it down further.

• Meter: the rhythm of a verse in poetry

• Foot: a repeated unit of meter containing a certain number of stressed and unstressed syllables

• Iamb: a foot of two syllables with the first being a short, unstressed syllable, and the second being a longer, stressed syllable

• Stress: the pitch in the pronunciation of a word

Iambic pentameter is a line with five iambs resulting in ten-syllable lines.

Where Did Iambic Pentameter Come From?

Iambic pentameter is thought to have its origins in Latin verse, often containing ten syllables, without distinguishing between feet. The 10-syllable style was picked up by French troubadours who extended the form to eleven syllables and used a caesura (a type of poetic pause). Later, Italian poets used the 11-syllable form, before Geoffrey Chaucer stepped onto the scene and cemented the meter as a staple of English literature.

How Do You Approach Iambic Pentameter?

Understand Iambs

An iamb is a type of poetic foot. To have an iamb, we must have an unstressed syllable immediately followed by a stressed one. The sound created is fluid and natural.

Think of the sound of your heart beat: da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.

Dictionary websites are valuable tools when beginning to work with iambs (and meter in general). They indicate the stress of words in their pronunciation guides by bolding or placing an apostrophe before stressed syllables.

What Do Stressed and Unstressed Even Mean?

The terms stressed and unstressed themselves can be causes of confusion. Another way to think about these concepts are as emphasized and unemphasized. Emphasized syllables are up, and unemphasized syllables are down; that is, when we say up and down, we mean where your voice goes when the word is spoken.

For example, when we say the word giraffe, we place the stress/emphasis on the -affe and not the gir-. This makes the word giraffe an iamb—two syllables where the first syllable is unstressed/unemphasized and the second is stressed/emphasized.

In a ten syllable line of iambic pentameter, the word giraffe takes up two of the ten syllables and creates one iamb.

What About Multisyllabic Words?

A multisyllabic word is a word that contains multiple syllables. For our purposes, we’re specifically referencing words with at least three syllables i.e. words that aren’t already neat iambs like our previous giraffe example.

Let’s consider the word arrangement with three syllables: uh-range-ment. The first syllable and third syllable of this multisyllabic word are unstressed, and the middle syllable is stressed. This means that arrange- is its own iamb, while -ment is the first half of another iamb.

In a ten syllable line of iambic pentameter, the word arrangement takes up three of the ten syllables and creates one and a half iambs.

What About Monosyllabic Words?

A monosyllabic word is a single syllable word: I, you, the, yes, no. Monosyllabic words can be either the easiest or most difficult when it comes to meter.

When crafting the line, the stress of these words will come down to how they sound with the words around them and how the poet intends the line to be read. The stress/emphasis of a monosyllabic word is subjective and requires listening to the word within the line, determining which part of the heartbeat it falls into.

References

1. “How to Write Iambic Pentameter with David Mamet - 2022.” MasterClass. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-iambic-pentameter-with-david-mamet

2. “Iambic Pentameter - Examples and Definition of Iambic Pentameter.” Literary Devices, April 25, 2020. https://literarydevices.net/iambic-pentameter/

3. Spurrill-Jones, Esther. “How to Write a Poem: Got Rhythm?” Medium. The Writing Cooperative, May 9, 2018. https://writingcooperative.com/how-to-write-a-poem-got-rhythm-29c42cdb3ec0 .

This page was published October 26, 2022.