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 (18701953)