Henry Constable and the Petrarchan Sonnet
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The most commonly used English foot.
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"an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable"
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As the stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable, the iamb is a "rising meter".
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As one iambic foot is composed of two syllables, the iamb is a "duple meter".
- "A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it."
- i.e. trimeter: three feet; octameter: eight feet
- pentameter: five feet
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"A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme."
- also called the Italian sonnet
- named after Francesco Petrarch
- composed of an octave (abbaabba) and a sestet (cdecde OR cdccdc)
- The subject matter was primarily that of the adoration of a young male lover.
Information taken from M.H. Abram's A Glossary of Literary Terms.
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created by Heather C. Milligan