Answered: What the hell is an Iambic Pentameter?
Ajinkya Nene
TY BSc. Economics (2022-25)
Estimated reading time ~ 9 minutes
They say inspiration strikes at the unlikeliest of times. It ambushed me at perhaps the unlikeliest time of them all – during a research methodology class. Those who have gone through the veritable quagmire of confused slides that form the backbone of the course would probably sooner believe that a snowball has a fighting chance in surviving hell than believe that the soulless slides actually inspired anything. Nevertheless, bear with me as I gently lead you down one of the best rabbit holes I ever fell through.
It was a gloomy winter morning and the class was working their way through the newest batch of slides. Eyes were glazed, attention was fleeting at best and the flickering of bullet points as slides were changed (not fast enough) meant that for every slide, perhaps one or two words would jump out to provide an interesting departure from the monotony. That was when I came across the name of the ancient Roman poet Martial, being honoured as one of the first to call out intellectual thievery. Now, I don’t know about you, but being remembered in history as the first one to call out and literally coin the term plagiarism warrants at least a Google search in my book. So the rabbit hole began.
Image source : Martial, supposedly.
I opened Martial’s Wikipedia page, and was shocked. If you are ever in the mood for some scathing, absolutely filthy yet venerably ancient witty poetry, look no further than Marcus Valerius Martialis. He is written proof that the ancients were both witty and filthy, truly a combination tried and tested against time. Martial wrote some fifteen hundred epigrams that we know about, dealing with the minutiae of city life that are largely still relevant in modern times.
As an aside, remember earlier when I said Martial contributed to coining the term plagiarism? It comes from the Latin plagiarius, which translates to kidnapper. Yes, Martial publicly accused a rival of “kidnapping” his verses, and it stuck. Personally,
I vote for bringing back the use of “kidnapping” in the parlance of intellectual theft disputes.
Since it would be nigh on impossible to give a complete overview on Martial and the classical Roman and Greek traditions of poetry and prose that spawned him in one article, allow me to direct your attention towards a single one of Martial’s epigrams which ought to serve our purpose:
Tongilianus, you paid two hundred for your house;
An accident too common in this city destroyed it.
You collected ten times more. Doesn’t it seem, I pray,
That you set fire to your own house, Tongilianus?
Source: From Book III, Number 52 of his works. Interestingly, this is also one of the first recorded instances of insurance fraud.
Although the epigram above is four lines, Martial’s signature style lies in a form of poetry called the elegiac couplet. Now, it should be apparent from the example above, but the epigram does not follow a rhyme scheme. By and large, neither do the rest of his epigrams, even the couplets. Free verse not really being a thing back when he was writing, I wondered, why exactly does this qualify as poetry and not just satire or humour? Perhaps it rhymed in the original Latin?
The answer to the second of these questions is a great deal less complex than the answer to the first, which we will get to soon. As it turns out, it is ridiculously easy to rhyme in Latin compared to English. You see, Latin is far more flexible than English when it comes to the order of words. That makes it a great deal easier to rhyme words which consequently means that since it is so easy to rhyme, Latin poets must prove the skill of their wordplay another way. Rhyming alone just doesn’t cut it.
Now having established the answer to the second question, we move on the first: what makes this poetry at all? In search of this answer, I looked up what exactly are elegiac couplets, and I found an old nemesis – poetic metres. Apparently elegiac couplets are a dactylic hexameter verse followed by a dactylic pentameter verse. If like me, this all seems Greek to you, strap in and let’s learn Greek together.
Image source: The structure of an elegiac couplet. Seeing something like this as an “explanation” without any context is enough to dampen anyone’s spirits.
This was not my first time tangling with poetic rhythm. Anyone who has read any poetry past a tenth grade level has probably at the least stumbled upon the concept of poetic rhythm and metres, and what seems like really fancy jargon like iambic pentameter (Shakespeare, anyone?) being bandied about.
However, poetic metres and all that impressive sounding jargon had never been taught in school, with any reference to poetic structure stopping at the rhyme scheme, if any. Any attempts to learn it independently had quickly fizzled away when presented with the daunting pictographs which apparently constituted an explanation. Over time, I deferred delving too deep into poetic rhythm on the mere principle that it all sounded a bit too pretentious anyway, something that mattered only to the most fervent of poets and poetry aficionados. After all, it seemed as though all you really needed to know is that “Shakespeare = iambic pentameter” and that there is some esoteric concept called metres that applies to the best poetry.
That day I finally broke down my self imposed barriers and learned what they mean by poetic metres, and believe me, it is glorious. Dangerously complex and sometimes frustratingly nuanced, but glorious nonetheless.
Here’s how the basics of poetic metres work, from the very top:-
Words have syllables. A syllable is a single unbroken sound. It helps to think of a syllable as a single unit of pronunciation, just like letters are a single unit of spelling. Naturally, with the way pronunciation works, some syllables have greater emphasis on them than others. The syllables with emphasis are called stressed syllables and denoted by (/) and unstressed syllables are denoted by ( ˘ or u ). Figuring out whether syllables are stressed or not can be nuanced and challenging, but it can be done based on the prevailing pronunciations in the language at the time.
Now, you can divide pretty much any body of words into stressed and unstressed syllables. Having done so, patterns can be found in the sequence that stressed and unstressed syllables appear. A specific sequence of at least two syllables that can be repeated is called a foot or a beat.
Some beats are so prevalent that they have been named, for example, the “iamb” – which is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one ( u / ) . There are others, such as the ‘trochee’ ( / u ) which is basically the opposite of the iamb, the ‘anapest’ ( uu/ ) and the ‘dactyl’ ( /uu).
The number of times a beat or foot is repeated in a single line of poetry is represented through the poetic metre, a unit. The number of beats themselves are represented as prefixes attached to metres in their Greek roots, such as mono for one repetition, di for two, tri for three, tetra for four, penta for five and so on.
Armed with the basics, we can now find out that the iambic pentameter refers to the iamb beat repeated five times in every line of the poem. Similarly, the elegiac couplets used by Martial and other ancient poets are composed of a dactylic hexameter verse followed by a dactylic pentameter verse. That is, a dactyl beat repeated six times in the first verse and then repeated five times in the second verse. The dactyl is quite rarely used in English due to linguistic constraints inherent to modern English but worked quite well in Latin and other languages.
Image source: The iambic pentameter in Sonnet 18, one of Shakespeare’s most well known poems.
And there we have it, the basics of poetic metres! If it still seems way too complex, that’s probably because it really is, and it only gets more complicated from here on out. If it does not seem complex, then you might want to consider that there are criteria apart from mere emphasis to decide what are stressed syllables and more importantly, that different languages have different types of metres, or that they may not use metres at all to represent rhythm. Sanskrit, for example, has hundreds of different metres called chandas that do not necessarily follow quite the same rules as the metres in English.
The effort, sheer will and linguistic ability that goes into composing a poem that is both powerfully expressive and bound by a rhythmic structure cannot be understated. From the ancient Greek and Sanskrit poets writing their epics, satirists and humorists like Martial to literary giants like Shakespeare and other, more modern poets – rhythmic structures have been the scaffolding upon which great literature has been crafted. Rhythm opened for me, and hopefully you too, a whole new dimension to appreciate in poetry, one that was firmly closed off before.