Teaching Iambic Pentameter

Many people may have heard of the term, but not many can tell what it is. This article will deal with Iambic Pentameter, which is a unit of the internal ‘beat’ in a poem. This unit can be made up of various beats and is called a ‘foot’. Two feet beats in which a unstressed beat followed by a stressed one are called an ‘Iamb’, or the adjective Iambic. When there are five of these in a poetic line it is called Pentameter, from the Greek ‘penta’ for five. Most English poems have this structure, because it most nearly resembles normal speech, and it is called ambicPentameter.

Other rhythmic styles are dactylic, trochaic, anapestic, and the number of feet per line are represented as monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter and so on. These other styles are also seen in English poetry but not as often as Iambic Pentameter. A poem that adheres strictly to a rhythmic structure may seem to be unnecessarily rigid but it also shows that the poet put that much more thought and preparation into the writing of the thoughts.

Analyzing a poem in this way to determine its rhythmic style is called ‘scanning’ and a foot is represented by a ~ for a hard beat and a / for a soft beat. A line of iambic pentameter with five feet is written ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / above the words or beat they represent in the poem. Read a poem in Iambic Pentameter to the class and emphasize the internal beat. Read it again and clap along as you read by a loud hard light clap for the unstressed beat and a hard clap for the stressed beat.

Next read the poem again and have the students clap the beat with you as you read. This will enable students to appreciate the rhythm inherent in the words and also they will see concretely what Iamb Pentameter is. Next hand out the same poem to each of the students and have them ‘scan’ it. Tell them they may experiment with clapping out the beat as they represent the feet on their poems. In this activity students will benefit from learning from each other, which has proven to be the best instruction method.

To evaluate the success of this lesson, give each student a different poem and have them repeat the process in class or for homework.