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This text explains the two types of pentameter in poetry: iambic and dactylic. Iambic is the most common in English, while dactylic is used in Ancient Greek and Latin. Both have five feet per line, with different types of feet based on syllable stress or length. Shakespeare used iambic extensively, sometimes inverting the da-DUM beat. Dactylic pentameter has two half lines, each with 2.5 feet, including dactyls and longums. Examples of dactylic verse in English are rare.
There are two types of pentameter used in poetry: iambic and dactylic. Iambic is the most commonly used form in English and is based on stressed and unstressed syllables. Dactylic is the most used form in Ancient Greek and Latin; it is based on syllable length. Such poetic forms are called pentameters because they have five feet per line.
A foot is the smallest unit of meter in poetry. There are many foot types based on the number of syllables contained within. The smaller foot has only two syllables while the larger foot has four. The feet are further divided by how the syllables are expressed, whether they are stressed or by length. Dactyls and iambs are two of the many types of poetic foot.
An iambic foot consists of two syllables. The first syllable is typically unstressed, while the second is stressed. This is often represented as da-DUM with ‘da’ meaning unstressed and ‘DUM’ meaning stressed. This syllabic couplet is repeated five times to create a line of pentametric lines. The da-DUM foot can be two whole words, parts of a word, or the end of one word and the beginning of another.
Sometimes, the da-DUM rhythm can be reversed to create DUM-da. When this occurs, the next iambic foot tends to revert to the original rhythm. William Shakespeare used iambic pentameter extensively in his poems and plays.
There are a number of examples of him inverting the da-DUM beat included in “Richard III”. In a speech in the play, one line reads: “Now is the winter of our discontent.” This line has a rhythm DUM-da, da-Dum, da-da, DUM-DUM, da-DUM. Hamlet’s famous speech, however, is more conventional with the only change: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” In this variation, there is a single inversion from -DUM with “that is”.
Dactylic pentameter consists of two half lines. Each half line consists of 2.5 feet. This means that there are a total of six feet, but they include a full five feet, so it is still called dactylic pentameter rather than its closely related cousin, dactylic hexameter. The 0.5 foot of each half comes from a longum or heavy syllable added to the end of two dactyls.
A dactyl consists of one long syllable followed by two short syllables. In the first half of a dactylic meter line, one or both dactyls may be replaced with aspondeo. A Spondeo is just a pair of long syllables. The last two feet that make up the second half-line must be composed of two dactyls and a longum.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are classic examples of dactylic pentameter. There are few examples of dactylic verse in English for linguistic reasons. Examples include Charles Kingsley’s “Andromeda” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Evangeline.”
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