Iambic Trimeter - Accentual-syllabic Iambic Trimeter

Accentual-syllabic Iambic Trimeter

In English similar accentual-syllabic metrical systems, a line of iambic trimeter consists of three iambic feet. The resulting six-syllable line is very short, and few poems are written entirely in this meter.

The 1948 poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke uses the trimeter:

...We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

William Blake's "Song ('I Love the Jocund Dance')" (1783) uses a loose iambic trimeter that sometimes incorporates additional weak syllables:

I love the jocund dance,
The softly breathing song,
Where innocent eyes do glance,
And where lisps the maiden's tongue.
I love the laughing gale,
I love the echoing hill,
Where mirth does never fail,
And the jolly swain laughs his fill.

Laura Marling's three recorded albums (Alas, I Cannot Swim, I Speak Because I Can and A Creature I Don't Know) all have titles in iambic trimeter.

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Famous quotes containing the word iambic:

    There is a Canon which confines
    A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse
    If written in Iambic Verse
    To fifty lines.
    Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)