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Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

Iambic pentameter never made any sense to me when I was in high school English, or really at any time since. My brain locks up trying to figure out what in the hell the difference actually is between the syllables in an iamb. It's probably not helpful that the dialect of English that I grew up with had some very parochial regional quirks, and most of the material that was trotted out as examples came from Elizabethan English, which would be somewhat incomprehensible spoken to most people today anyway. Long/short, stressed/unstressed, accented/unaccented, none of these descriptions illuminates much, at least for me.

When I had to write some sonnets in pentameter, I had to find some web pages that diagrammed out what the "proper" structure of words was, so I could pick out synonyms that might work...

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To understand the difference between stressed and unstressed, it may be useful to consider versions of words which differ only in their stress pattern, of which we have a few. Record, the verb, as in "I'll record the show", is two syllables, unstressed-stressed. Record, the noun, as in "Hey, wanna listen to my new record?" is stressed-unstressed. Ditto address the verb vs. address the noun (at least in American English). In fact, we have a whole family of these words with two versions, mostly french-derived bisyllables, known as initial-stress-derived nouns[0].

Most words of more than one syllable have one primary stress. (Sometimes longer ones have a second, weaker stress, too.) In words of more than one syllable, the stress more often than not falls on the second syllable, though this is far from universal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun

I feel your pain! I think a big part of the problem is that most of the iambic pentameter examples taught in school are actually not iambic pentameter (at least not with modern-day speech patterns). I expanded on this more in another comment, but I find it much easier to think about meter when not trying to fit Shakespeare into it.

The best (short) explanation I can think of is: if you were to read the line like you were saying it in normal, fairly fast speech, which syllables would have ever so slightly more oomph ? For example, the sentence "I want to go to the museum." to me sounds most natural as:

  i WANT to GO to the muSEum

then for iambic you just see if that follows a pattern of unstressed/stressed (it doesn't here). An example that is iambic would be: "You'd rather eat than see the show?"

  you'd RAther EAT than SEE the SHOW

Hope that's more helpful than hurtful! :)

I'm pretty sure you were just trying to showcase the stresses, but your last example is in iambic tetrameter, not pentameter. Which is another frequent source of confusion.

For some reason, the fact that "penta" stands for "five" (like the Pentagon!) seems to get lost in a lot of these discussions. They must be teaching poetry these days without explaining the Greek/Latin origin of the terms they use.

Word roots are fascinating. Epics were written in dactylic hexameter. Dactyls mean fingers. You know, as in pterodactyls. They're called pterodactyls because their wings (ptero-) were supported by their long fingers. A dactyl has three syllables, DA-da-da, just like the sections of your fingers.

Yes, sorry! I was trying to just discuss the "iambic" part and ignore the "pentameter," which I'd assumed (maybe incorrectly) was not the source of confusion. Thanks for the clarification.

I think your experience is common. I never had any trouble "hearing" meter in poetry (though I'm completely oblivious to time signatures in music, which feels like it ought to be very closely related) but know plenty of people who do.

One other practical impact of this is trying to learn languages like Chinese where a stressed versus unstressed syllable is very often the difference between two completely unrelated words.

>* I'm completely oblivious to time signatures in music,*

You sure can tell a waltz (3/4) from a house track (4/4, usually solid 4 on the floor)

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