Fourteener (poetry) - Illustrations

Illustrations

• William Blake used lines of fourteen syllables, for example in The Book of Thel. These lines, however, are not written in iambic heptameter.

• Emily Dickinson frequently used iambic heptameter reworked as ballad stanzas, for example:

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

• J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a poem titled "Galadriel's Song of Eldamar" using only fourteeners. Many of Tolkien's other songs also use heptameter.

• The Gravemind from the Halo Trilogy speaks in fourteeners.

• The seventh song of Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella is written in rhyming fourteener couplets:

Who have so leaden eyes, as not to see sweet beauty's show,

Or seeing, have so wooden wits, as not that worth to know?

• Sidney's friend, the translator Arthur Golding, was extremely fond of fourteeners:

Now have I brought a work to end which neither Jove's fierce wrath,

Nor sword, nor fire, nor fretting age with all the force it hath

Are able to abolish quite. Let come that fatal hour

Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over me no power,

And at his pleasure make an end of mine uncertain time.

Yet shall the better part of me assured be to climb

Aloft above the starry sky. And all the world shall never

Be able for to quench my name. For look how far so ever

The Roman empire by the right of conquest shall extend,

So far shall all folk read this work. And time without all end

(If poets as by prophecy about the truth may aim)

My life shall everlastingly be lengthened still by fame. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.984-95, tr. Golding)

• The theme to Gilligan's Island is largely composed in iambic heptameter:

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip

That started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship.