Which by and by black night doth take a way,ĭeath's second self, that seals up all in rest…Ĭontemporary examples of iambic pentameter in poetry tend to be interwoven with other iambic and varied forms of meter within the poem, including sonnets. In me thou see’st the twilight of such day Up on those boughs which shake a gainst the cold,īare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang That time of year thou mayst in me be hold

For instance, “ That time of year thou mayst in me behold (Sonnet 73)” indicates the use of iambic meter with every stressed syllable in bold with the following scansion: William Shakespeare famously wrote his plays and sonnets in iambic pentamer. John Milton used iambic pentamer in his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) and William Wordsworth also used the metric form in his autobiographical poem in blank verse The Prelude (1798). To write in iambic pentameter the prosody of each poetic line is: Pentameter is historically found in French and Italian classic poetry and was first found used in English poetry thanks to Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century. Pentameter originating from the French word pentametre became known since the sixteenth century to define “a verse line of five metrical feet.” Pentameter is one of the traditional types of meter used. Iamb meter was first used in the seventh century BC by Archilochus and is heavily prevalent in classical Greek, Latin, and English poetry from before the twentieth century. In prosody, the term iambic became known in the sixteenth century to define a poetic foot of two syllables wherein the first syllable is short, also known as unstressed and unaccented, and the second syllable is long, known as stressed and accented. Iambic pentameter is a rising meter form consisting of five pairs of unstressed and stressed or accented syllables as five iambic feet per line.

Iambic pentameter sonnet examples