What is Iambic Pentameter? An Audio Demonstration.
Channel: Russ McClay
Date: 2015-10-03

What is Iambic Pentameter?  

As I was practicing a little bit from Hamlet I realized it was a perfect example of pure iambic pentameter.  An iamb is two syllables, like "To be" or "be-lieve". Five of those couplets are imabic pentameter. In this audio record I exaggerate the beat to illustrate.  

Here's a nice little bit from Richard Burton's _Diary_: 

On hearing the news that he is to be a temporary Oxford don Burton writes, for his own eyes: "How funny it will be to be lecturing at Oxford without a degree! Now I've always had the pregnant woman's yearning for the academic life, probably spurious, and a term of smelly tutorials and pimply lectures should effect a sharp cure. I would like to deal with either the medieval poets in English, French, Italian and German and possibly some of the Celtic like Welsh & Irish or to confine myself to the "Fantasticks", Donne, Traherne, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert . . . That chap Herbert was indeed a box where sweets compacted lie. I am as thrilled by the English language as I am by a lovely woman or dreams, green as dreams and deep as death. Christ, I'm off and running and will lecture to them until iambic pentameter comes out of their nostrils. Little do they know how privileged they are to speak and read and think in the greatest language invented by man." 

* * * 

Hamlet / Act 3 / Scene 2 / Line 184

I do believe you think what now you speak,
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity,
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree,
But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be.
Most necessary ’tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament.
Grief joys, joy grieves on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change.
For ’tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favorite flies.
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend,
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But, orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown.
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
So think thou wilt no second husband wed,
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.