The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Lots of food for thought there, much of it beyond the scope of this book. The point is that the eleven-syllable line is open to you in your iambic verse.

Why not nine syllables, you may be thinking? Why not dock a syllable and have a nine-syllable line with a weak ending?Let’s sit ourselves be side this river

Well, this docking, this catalexis, results in an iambic tetrameter (four accents to a line) with a weak ending, that extra syllable. The point about pentameter is that it must have five stresses in it. The above example has only four, hence tetra meter (pronounced, incidentally, tetrAmeter, as pentameter is pentAmeter).

Writers of iambic pentameter always add an unstressed syllable to make eleven syllables with five beats, they don’t take off a strong one to make four. They must keep that count of five. If you choose iambic pentameter you stick to it. The heroic line, the five-beat line, speaks in a very particular way, just as a waltz has an entirely different quality from a polka. A four-beat line, a tetrameter, has its individual characteristics too as we shall soon see, but it is rare to mix them up in the same poem. It is no more a rule than it is a rule never to use oil paints and watercolours in the same picture, but you really have to know what you’re doing if you decide to try it. For the purposes of these early exercises, we’ll stay purely pentametric.

Here are a few examples of hendecasyllabic iambic pentameter, quoting some of the same poets and poems we quoted before. They all go:

OUT WITH YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THEM UP: don’t forget to SAY THEM OUT LOUD to yourself to become familiar with the effect of the weak ending.So priketh hem nature in hir corages;Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages¹³CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales, General PrologueA woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 20That thou shall see the diff’rence of our spirits,I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1How heinous had the fact been, how deservingContempt, and scorn of all to be excludedMILTON,¹⁴Samson AgonistesOur Brethren, are from Thames to Tweed departed,And of our Sisters, all the kinder hearted,To Edenborough gone, or Coacht, or Carted.DRYDEN: ‘Prologue to the University of Oxford’What can enable sots, or slaves or cowards?Alas! not all the blood of all the HOWARDS.POPE:¹⁵ Essay on ManIt gives to think that our immortal being…WORDSWORTH:¹⁶The PreludeA thing of beauty is a joy for everIts loveliness increases: it will neverPass into nothingness;KEATS: Endymion, Book OneAnd like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,ROBERT FROST: ‘Spring Pools’With guarded unconcerned accelerationSEAMUS HEANEY: ‘From the Frontier of Writing’There’s far too much encouragement for poets–WENDY COPE: ‘Engineers’ Corner’

Substitutions

I hope you can see that the feminine ending is by no means the mark of imperfect iambic pentameter. Let us return to Macbeth, who is still unsure whether or not he should stab King Duncan:To prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on th’ other.–How now! what news?

We have cleared up the first variation in this selection of three lines, the weak or unstressed ending. But what about this ‘vaulting ambition’ problem? Keats has done it too, look, at the continuation to his opening to Endymion:A thing of beauty is a joy for everIts loveliness increases: it will neverPass into nothing ness; but still will keepA bower quiet for us, and a sleepFull of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

The first feet of lines 3 and 5 are ‘inverted iambs’ or trochees. What Keats and Shakespeare have employed here is sometimes called trochaic substitution, a technique, like weak endings, too common to be considered a deviation from the iambic norm. It is mostly found, as in the above instances and the following, in the first foot of a line. You could call it a trochaic substitution, or the inversion of an iamb–it amounts to the same thing.

Mix’d in each other’s arms, and heart in heart,BYRON: Don Juan, Canto IV, XXVIIWell have ye judged, well ended long debate,Synod of gods, and like to what ye are,MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book IIFar from the madding crowd’s ignoble strifeGRAY: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 18