Iambic Pentameter.

What in the words is it?

At its most basic, iambic pentameter is our way of being and speaking. There is a flow and rhythm to our bodies and speech which caught the ear of the poet. Those rhymers of words saw the sounds and patterns, and they presented the model of our beats and speech in the iambic pentameter of their works that are so pleasing to hear and lift us above the more common verse of our daily lives.

“I don’t have time to speak in iambic pentameter,” the student shouts goodbye to his mom as he rushes out the door, “Verse will have to do today.” And it does, but in that everyday verse are the seeds of the iambic pentameter of the poets, because we ourselves are the more poetic verse.

In “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare has Romeo say of his maid Juliet who is fairer than the moon,

“That thou her maid art far more fair than she”

that THOU / her MAID / art FAR / more FAIR / than SHE

da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM

Can you hear it? That’s iambic pentameter? Each “da DUM” is an unstressed syllable (da) followed by a stressed syllable (DUM), and each da DUM is called a foot or an “iamb.” When a line has five feet, the line is referred to as a “pentameter,” with “penta” meaning five and “meter” representing the measure or length of the line. A line of five iambs is a line of iambic pentameter.

da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM

Let’s use a line from John Keats’ “Autumn,”

“To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells”

to SWELL / the GOURD / and PLUMP / the HAZ / el SHELLS

da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM

Now, a question for you: What do the individual iambs, the da DUM’s, sound like? Your heart — the human heart beat is the “da DUM.” That’s the “iamb,” an unstressed beat followed by a stressed beat, a relaxation (filling) followed by a contraction (pumping). Open and close your fist. That’s how your heart muscle does its regular work. It is our most basic rhythm, the one we remember from our mother’s heart close to us, the sound that comforted us in our beginnings and the sound we took with us when we were born, along with a good loud cry, meaning in baby talk, “I am here!” “I am” for iambic, and “da DUM” for the sound of your heart.

Why five “da DUM’s” to the line? Shakespeare’s lines are five. Why five iambs or feet to his lines? I think he wrote in fives because we speak in fives. It’s about the length of a normal or regular sentence, about as long as we like to say and hear a good sound bite. I will defer to the bard. William Shakespeare may have known words better than anyone who’s ever lived and spoken them. His sounds sound about right to me and many others, and he chose the pentameter for the pattern of his iambs, his normal heart beats.

Of course, Shakespeare varied his sounds because people do their’s, and variations make for more ear fun. So a da DUM may be a DA dum, called an inversion because it reverses the order of the stress in the syllables. Another thing young William did was add an extra unstressed syllable, da DUM da, to the end of a line to add interest and an air of mystery,

“To be, or not to be, that is the question”

to BE / or Not / to BE / THAT is / the QUEST ion

da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | DA dum | da DUM da

So Hamlet speaks in the line of iambic pentameter that is perhaps the most memorable and quoted in all of Shakespeare. “That is” is the inversion (DA dum), and “the question” (da DUM da) has the extra unstressed syllable at the end which is perhaps that most mysterious question without a question mark in the history of literature.

There is rhyme and rhythm to our lives and our words. The poets understood this and shared with us what we already felt but did not know so we could hear the echoes of ourselves in their words.

Listen to the words, put a hand over your heart and remember who you are,

Grandpa Jim