The Pleasing Power of the Poetic Pentameters

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n                    Put your hand on your heart. Justnfor a short while. Feel how it beats. Take notice of what you feel. Can younfeel it going di-Dum, di-Dum, di-Dum, di-Dum, di-Dum? A short beat and a longnbeat; a weak beat and a strong beat. di-Dum. 

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nIn poetry – or prosody -nthat di-Dum, that short syllable and that long syllable, is called an iamb.nPut five di-Dums together and that’s a line of iambic pentameter. Pentameternbecause there are five of them; pentameter like pentagon, something with fivenparts. Five meters or what are called five poetical ‘feet’. 

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nPoets use iambicnpentameter a lot, just because it’s so natural, like a heartbeat. di-Dum,ndi-Dum, di-Dum. Poets use these ten syllables, these five iambs, because it’snjust so very powerful. It speaks to us, deep in our hearts. Take a word liken‘declare’ – we say de-CLARE not DE-clare, it’s a weak, unstressed syllablenfollowed by a strong, stressed syllable. We say re-LEASE, not RE-lease,nto-NIGHT not TO-night, a-BOUT not A-bout. Let’s look at a line of poetry – thenopening line of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.  The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. 

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nNow read that and clap on the second of each pair of syllables. the CURfewnTOLLS the KNELL of PARTing DAY.  That’snhow iambic pentameter works. Weak followed by strong. di-Dum, di-Dum, di-Dum,ndi-Dum, di-Dum. Ten syllables in five pairs, five iambs. Shakespeare uses it innblank verse, in the plays. He also uses a slight variant, when the final strongnsyllable of the line is left off – this is called the feminine form – in linesnlike this one from Hamlet, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’n– ‘to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUESTion’. 

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nHe does this for dramatic effectn– uncompleted, this pattern is slightly unsettling, it plays on our mindsnbecause it’s not quite as it should be, reflecting Hamlet’s own wondering aboutnhis continuing to be. This is why Shakespeare is such a fine poet. He takes thenform and adapts it to his own intention. Let me illustrate how. When he wantsnto unsettle us, he reverses the form. Instead of having that natural di-Dumnrhythm, he does the opposite – he uses the Di-dum, Di-dum – what in prosody isncalled the trochee, the strong syllable followed by the soft – he wantsnus unsettled by the witches in Macbeth, so he has them say, “Whennshall we three meet again” – ‘WHEN shall WE three MEET aGAIN’. 

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nWilliamnBlake does the same in The Tyger – “TYger TYger BURNing BRIGHT”, henwants us to be afraid of the tiger, and uses the feminine form again, leavingnoff that final syllable once more, when our ear expects it to be there. We feelnthat something is wrong here, something that is scary. Tennyson does it usingnanother poetical foot, the dactyl, which uses a strong syllable followednby two weak syllables. Dactyl is Greek for ‘finger’ – look at yournknuckle on your hand and follow that look along your finger. From the knucklenis a long bone followed by two short bones. It’s a dactyl. You know the word,neven if you think you don’t. 

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nThat flying dinosaur, the pterodactyl thatnenchanted you when you were a child – well ptero means winged,nand dactyl means finger (the word poetry is,ncoincidentally, a dactyl – PO–et-ry). 

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nIn The Charge of the Light Brigade,nTennyson uses dactyls, a foot one step stronger than the trochee, to make usenfeel uneasy – ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward’ –n‘HALF a league, HALF a league, HALF a league ONward’. It’s that feminine endingnagain. These lancers shouldn’t be riding into that valley of Death, they reallynshouldn’t be going that deadly half a league onward towards those cannons. 

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nIt’snreally not going to turn out well at all. The dactyl reflects the pounding ofnthe horses’ hooves, Dum-di-di Dum-di-di, but it also doesn’t sit well on ournears, we know instinctively that ‘someone has blundered’ – SOMEone hasnBLUN-dered’. And obviously, if iambs are the opposite of trochees, then dactylsnmust also have an opposite, which they have – it’s an anapaest. The anapaestncan be used in some serious poetry – Byron uses it in his The Destruction ofnSennacherib – The Assyrian came down like a wolf onnthe fold – but it turns up more usually in comic verse. Limericksnoften use the anapaest as a matter of course, and Lewis Carroll uses thenanapaest in The Hunting of the Snark (more of which on another day).

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