In poetic form, though the Romanticists did not completely abandon the pentameter couplet for a hundred years, they did energetically renounce any exclusive allegiance to it and returned to many other meters.
The rime-scheme is ababbcbcc, and in the last line the iambic pentametergives place to an Alexandrine (an iambic hexameter).
Does the rimed pentametercouplet prove itself a possible poetic vehicle for such emotion?
Since he was primarily a poet it is natural to speak first of his verse; and we must begin with a glance at the history of the rimed pentameter couplet, which he carried to the highest point of effectiveness thus far attained.
First among the dramatists of the popular stage he discarded rime, and taking and vitalizing the stiff pentameter line of 'Gorboduc,' gave it an immediate and lasting vogue for tragedy and high comedy.
A present-day reader may like the pentametercouplet or may find it frigid and tedious; at any rate Dryden employed it in the larger part of his verse and stamped it unmistakably with the strength of his strong personality.
Pope accepted this hint as his guiding principle and proceeded to seek correctness by giving still further polish to the pentameter couplet of Dryden.
His stanza combinations reproduce all the well-proportioned grace of his French models, and to the pentameter riming couplet of his later work he gives the perfect ease and metrical variety which match the fluent thought.
He first gives his reasons for preferring iambic pentameter to the ‘Reinartsvers,’ which some might think best to use.
Moreover, the iambic pentameter lends itself well to division into hemistichs, the principal characteristic of the ancient epic versification.
They deviated more than Shakespeare, who did not always confine himself to the iambic foot andpentameter line in his blank verse.
His productions, all written either in heroic or pentameter verse, are numerous, and on various subjects.
But he is a genuine poet, and a generous, warm-hearted man, and in our opinion by far the greatest master of the pentameter that Rome ever produced.
Nec moriens Dido summa vidisset ab arce Dardanias vento vela dedisse rates, and even here the pentameter forms a clause by itself.
There the pentameter answers to the second half of Virgil's hexameter verse, and rings the changes on the line that has preceded in a very similar way.
Ottava rima is composed of eight iambic pentameter verses with alternate rhymes, except the last two lines, which form a rhymed couplet.
Unrhymed poetry, usually in iambic pentameter measure, is known as blank verse.
The sonnet is a lyric poem consisting of fourteen iambicpentameter lines.
The same may be said of the Romans, though with them it will occasionally be found that the semi-feet of the pentameter constitute what may be called accidental rhyme.
Elegies were originally written by the Greeks in alternate hexameter and pentameter lines, "versibus impariter junctis.
In the Hexameter rises the fountain's silvery current, In the Pentameter aye falling in melody down.
His brilliantly emotional Cynthia, with its rich and unexampled employment of that alternation of hexameter and pentameter which had now come to be known as the elegiac measure, seems, however, to have settled the type of Latin elegy.
The Dactylic Pentameterconsists of two parts, each of which contains two dactyls, followed by a long syllable.
The Best Wine", by William de Ryee, is an earnestly introspective poem, well cast in iambic pentameter quatrains.
Evening Prayer", by Rheinhart Kleiner, is a poem of great beauty and real worth, couched in the alternating iambic pentameter and trimeter which this poet seems to have made his own particular medium of expression.
When I Am Gone," a poem in pentameter quatrains by James Laurence Crowley, contains the customary allotment of sweet sentiment, together with some really commendable imagery.
The metre, which is well handled, consists of regular iambic pentameter quatrains with a couplet at the conclusion.
The end of the pentameter generally coincides with a pause in the sense.
The name Iambelegus was given to the verse because the ancient grammarians regarded it as a dactylic pentameter for the first half of which an iambic colon had been substituted.
In form it is the same as the second half of the pentameter (2570).
Ovid nearly always closes the pentameterwith a disyllabic word; but earlier poets, especially Catullus, are less careful in this regard.
The common assumption is, that Chaucer borrowed the pentameter couplet directly from French poetry.
Coleridge also translated from Schiller the well-known distich describing and exemplifying the elegiac verse of Ovid: "In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
Most blank verse makes use of the iambic pentameter measure, but we find many exceptions.
A quatrain consisting of iambic pentameter verse with alternate rhymes is called an elegiac stanza.
And here we must pause to say that in the literary structure, language, and rhythm of the poem, Dryden had made a great step toward that mastery of the rhymed pentameter couplet, which is one of his greatest claims to distinction.
In The Village he describes homely scenes with great power, in pentameter verse.
Thus in his blank verse Surrey was the forerunner of Milton, and in his rhymed pentameter couplet one of the heralds of Dryden and Pope.
He is claimed as the introducer of blank verse--the iambicpentameter without rhyme, occasionally broken for musical effect by a change in the place of the cæsural pause.
For example, three dactylic stanzas, in each of which a pentameter couplet is followed by a hexameter line, and this again by a heptameter, are introduced by Prof.
A succession of rhymed pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich fettered English verse for three-quarters of a century.
In this poem, as in the bulk of his work, he employs the unenjambed pentameter distich; that is, a couplet with five accented syllables in each verse and with the sense terminating with the couplet.
Every pentameter of the amatory poems and the first fifteen Heroides ends in a disyllable.
The subject of transit must be Olympias, since otherwise the pentameter is without a subject.
The -que logically belongs with fasces, joining it with praetextam: such dislocations are common in the pentameter because of its strict metrical requirements.
F1's interpolation for the missing pentameter at iii 44 differs from that of MHILT, while M has an interpolated distich following x 6 that is not otherwise attested.
Ovid allows pentasyllabic words to end the pentameter only in the poetry of exile (Platnauer 17).
Korn's conjecture makes the pentameter an amplification of the hexameter, a common pattern in Ovid; its corruption to secretis would be easy.
But the verb should be taken not with the pentameter that precedes, but with the one that follows, 'densaque quam longum turba teneret iter': prospicerem seems very appropriate.
Now, this principle of pure rhythm at the end of each strain, is peculiarly impressed upon the hexameter-pentameter distich.
The alternate hexameter and pentameter are, for most purposes, a more agreeable measure than the hexameter by itself.
In the pentameter Verse these Pronouns, it is well known, are remarkably serviceable to constitute the last Foot; but it is one of the poorest Expedients that can be thought of!
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "pentameter" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
