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The
language of poetry – iambic pentameter
Gillian Clarke
Look up ‘metre’ in a book of poetry terms, and you’ll find too
much to take in, so I’ve chosen the important one, Shakespeare’s favourite,
the rhythm we still write and speak. Take iambic first. It’s where the
stress falls on the second of two syllables in a line of poetry. ‘Shall
I compare thee to a summers day’ – Shakespeare. When the stress falls
on the first syllable, as in ‘double, double, toil and trouble’, it’s
called trochaic metre. Pentameter means five beats in a line. There are monometers
(one beat), dimeters (two), trimeters (three), and so on, but pentameter is
natural to us all. "Your sister dyes her hair, I’m sure she does."
Above all it is the tune of the sonnet, the 14 line poem centuries old and still
written today. Look to Shakespeare for the best examples. I thought I had written
a few, but my sonnets have so many irregularities that I must send myself back
to poetry school. Here is a 16 line poem that at least shows how like ordinary
speech a line of pentameter can be, whether it’s iambic or not.
A very cold lamb
With a book to finish and umpteen things to do,
here I am kneeling in straw with a young ewe
fussing and mothering about me, drying the lambs
she slithered from her hot womb into the stream
where we found them, took them for frozen or drowned.
Working together, my hair-drier and her breath,
we warm two shivering lambs from the brink of death.
One is so cold it can’t open its mouth to cry
for shaking, shaking hungry death by the throat,
that fox with a taste for soft tissue, that bird of doom
after each intricate beautiful brain, each eye.
We work for an hour, the drier humming, the ewe
licking their syrups with her passionate tongue,
calling the blood to their limbs, liver, lungs,
each womb as small as a nut. The two lambs strive.
They’re warming to the idea of staying alive.
This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 8 September 2000