What’s actually happening is that the wider line structures echo the metrical structure: just as the feet go weak-strong, so the lines go weak- strong.
You might put the thought into iambic pentameters:The weaker ending forms a kind of question
The stronger ending gives you your reply.
The finality of downstroke achieved by a strong ending seems to answer the lightness of a weak one. After all, the most famous weak ending there is just happens to be the very word ‘question’ itself…To be, or not to be: that is the question.
It is not a rule, the very phrase ‘question-and-answer’ is only an approximation of what we mean by ‘dialectic’ and, naturally, there is a great deal more to it than I have suggested. Through French poetry we have inherited a long tradition of alternating strong-weak line endings, which we will come to when we look at verse forms and rhyme. The point I am anxious to make, however, is that metre is more than just a ti-tum ti- tum: its very regularity and the consequent variations available within it can yield a structure that EXPRESSES MEANING QUITE AS MUCH AS THE WORDS THEMSELVES DO.
Which is not to say that eleven syllable lines only offer questions: sometimes they are simply a variation available to the poet and result in no particular extra meaning or effect. Kipling does demonstrate though, in his hoary old favourite, that when used deliberately and regularly, alternate measures can do more. The metrist Timothy Steele12has pointed out how Shakespeare, in his twentieth sonnet ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted’ uses only weak endings throughout the poem: every line is eleven syllables. Shakespeare’s conceit in the poem (his image, or overarching concept) is that his beloved, a boy, has all the feminine graces. The proliferation of feminine endings is therefore a kind of metrical pun.
Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ is another celebrated example of iambic pentameter ending with that extra or hypermetrical unstressed syllable. Note, incidentally, that while you would not normally choose to emphasise a word like ‘and’ in a line of poetry, the beauty of Shakespeare’s iambs here is that the rhythm calls for the actor playing Macbeth to hit those ‘ands’ harder than one would in a line like:I want some jam and tea and toast today
With Shakespeare’s line…Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
…the futility and tedium of the succession of tomorrows is all the more manifest because of the metrical position of those ‘ands’. Which of us hasn’t stressed them in sentences like ‘I’ve got to mow the lawn and pick up the kids from school and do the tax returns and write a thank you letter and cancel the theatre tickets and ring the office…’?
An eleven-syllable line was more the rule than the exception in Italian poetry, for the obvious reason that an iambic hendecasyllabic line must have a weak ending, like-a almost-a ever-y word-a in Italian-o. Dante’s Inferno is written in iambic endecasillabo.Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
An English translation might go, in iambic pentameter:Midway upon the journey through our life
There would be no special reason to use hendecasyllables in translating the Inferno: in fact, it would be rather difficult. English, unlike Italian, is full of words that end with a stressed syllable. The very nature of the iamb is its light-heavy progression, it seems to be a deeply embedded feature of English utterance: to throw that away in the pursuit of imitating the metrics of another language would be foolish.
Lots of food for thought there, much of it beyond the scope of this book. The point is that the eleven-syllable line is open to you in your iambic verse.
Why not nine syllables, you may be thinking? Why not dock a syllable and have a nine-syllable line with a weak ending?Let’s sit ourselves be side this river
Well, this docking, this catalexis, results in an iambic tetrameter (four accents to a line) with a weak ending, that extra syllable. The point about pentameter is that it must have five stresses in it. The above example has only four, hence tetra meter (pronounced, incidentally, tetrAmeter, as pentameter is pentAmeter).
Writers of iambic pentameter always add an unstressed syllable to make eleven syllables with five beats, they don’t take off a strong one to make four. They must keep that count of five. If you choose iambic pentameter you stick to it. The heroic line, the five-beat line, speaks in a very particular way, just as a waltz has an entirely different quality from a polka. A four-beat line, a tetrameter, has its individual characteristics too as we shall soon see, but it is rare to mix them up in the same poem. It is no more a rule than it is a rule never to use oil paints and watercolours in the same picture, but you really have to know what you’re doing if you decide to try it. For the purposes of these early exercises, we’ll stay purely pentametric.
Here are a few examples of hendecasyllabic iambic pentameter, quoting some of the same poets and poems we quoted before. They all go:
OUT WITH YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THEM UP: don’t forget to SAY THEM OUT LOUD to yourself to become familiar with the effect of the weak ending.So priketh hem nature in hir corages;Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages13CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales, General PrologueA woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 20That thou shall see the diff’rence of our spirits,I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1How heinous had the fact been, how deservingContempt, and scorn of all to be excludedMILTON,14Samson AgonistesOur Brethren, are from Thames to Tweed departed,And of our Sisters, all the kinder hearted,To Edenborough gone, or Coacht, or Carted.DRYDEN: ‘Prologue to the University of Oxford’What can enable sots, or slaves or cowards?Alas! not all the blood of all the HOWARDS.POPE:15 Essay on ManIt gives to think that our immortal being… WORDSWORTH:16The PreludeA thing of beauty is a joy for everIts loveliness increases: it will neverPass into nothingness;KEATS: Endymion, Book OneAnd like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,ROBERT FROST:
