With Pope, it’s as if he’s declaiming from a pulpit or lectern (his poem is called An Essay on Criticism, after all), but with Wordsworth, it’s more like someone taking us into their confidence and talking quietly to us about their memories and experiences. And both Pope’s and Wordsworth’s iambic pentameter verse does exploit that chief quality that iambic pentameter possesses: its similarity to the rhythms of English speech. We can observe a key difference between these two uses of iambic pentameter: Pope was going for the pithy, artificial, controlled line for rhetorical effect (rhyming couplets end-stopped lines), whereas Wordsworth almost wants us to forget his lines are written in iambic pentameter at all (no rhyme run-on lines).īut of course, Wordsworth’s lines are just as much iambic pentameter as Pope’s. So at the end of the second line (‘again I hear’), we have to keep reading onto the next line to find out what Wordsworth heard (‘These waters’).
#DEFINITION OF SCANSION SERIES#
Instead, we get treated to a series of run-on lines (the French term sometimes used for this is enjambement), whereby the end of each line moves seamlessly into the beginning of the next. Second, Wordsworth’s lines aren’t end-stopped. These lines, like Pope’s, are written in iambic pentameter, but there are two crucial differences. Thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect These waters, rolling from their mountain-springsĭo I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
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#DEFINITION OF SCANSION FULL#
If you look at the end of every even line above, you’ll see it concludes either with a full stop or a semi-colon, which is a sort of ‘light’ version of a full-stop, a halfway house between the comma and full stop.)Ĭontrast Pope’s end-stopped lines of iambic pentameter with these lines, written at the other end of the eighteenth century by William Wordsworth, in his poem ‘ Tintern Abbey’ from 1798:įive years have past five summers, with the length (Pope is also writing in heroic couplets – pairs of iambic pentameter lines rhymed aabbcc and so on – so each couplet forms its own self-contained point. This has the effect of rendering each line its own little unit, allowing us to pause for breath once we reach the end of each line, take in the point being made, and then continue. Pope’s lines of iambic pentameter are end-stopped because each line concludes with a pause, signalled by a mark of punctuation: a comma, a semi-colon, a full stop. And sometimes you can speak in iambs when you hadn’t even thought to speak in verse. And five feet – ten syllables – is not a bad approximation for the length of a clause in English. Many of our words are iambic many of our sentences fall naturally into an iambic rhythm. Well, the reason often given is that iambic pentameter is the metre which most closely approximates to natural human speech in English. Why has iambic pentameter proved such a usable and versatile metre for English poetry? It’s integral to many of Browning’s and Tennyson’s dramatic monologues. It is the metre of the heroic couplets used by Alexander Pope and John Dryden.
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It is the metre found in blank verse – what most of Shakespeare’s plays are written in (indeed, Shakespeare’s sonnets are also written in iambic pentameter, with the exception of one).
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Iambic pentameter has been in English poetry for a long time, since at least the work of Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century.