Now, the way we're taught to talk about these two lines is to say that they are in iambic pentameter. There are two parts to this. First, "iambic." And second, "pentameter."
"Iambic" is a Greek word that in English just means an upbeat. The iambic conductor puffs out his man chest, lifts his batoned hand up, and everybody sees the eighth note hovering there before the bar line on their music stands, and the string tremolo builds, and the mallets of the tympani blur, and the chord swells, and crests, and gets foamy at the ridge, and then the baton comes down and a big green glittering word-wave crashes down on the downbeat. Ya-ploosh. Ka-posh. "All human things." That's the iamb. It's a kind of sneeze. Iambs can begin four-beat lines or so-called pentameter lines, which are really six-beat lines. "Oh who can from this dungeon raise." "A soul enslaved so many ways." "And what is Art whereto we press." "The world is too much with us." "I met a man who wasn't there." Let's see, what are some more? "The wed ding guest, he beat his breast." "My lit tle horse must think it queer." Dang, I keep wanting to use shorter lines as my examples. Which is my point.
But let's see, let's see. "I should have been a pair of ragged claws." Prufrock. Iambic pentameter. "When I have fears that I may cease to be." Keats, iambic pentameter. "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Yeats, iambic pentameter. "And slender hairs cast shadows, though but small." Dyer. "If you can keep your head when all about you." Kipling. "The art of losing isn't hard to master." Elizabeth Bishop. "They flee from me who sometime did me seek." Et cetera, et cetera. "Et cetera" is an iambic rhythm, if you pronounce it the way the French do. And iambs are extremely common. The first syllable is an upbeat to the line, and the rhythm is a game of tennis-it's that basic duple rhythm, badoom, badoom, badoom.
Now one problem with "iamb" as a name for this clearly audible upbeat phenomenon is that the word "iamb" isn't iambic, it's trochaic. A trochee is a flipped iamb. It's like a staple-crunch: crunk-unk. "Iamb" is trochaic. Isn't that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard? And we've tolerated and taught this impossible Greek terminology for centuries. If iamb were pronounced "I am!"-as a counterfactual-it would itself be iambic. "I am interested in what you're saying!" "I am going to take out the garbage!" "I think therefore I am!" You hear that? Then "iamb" would be a decent name for what's going on. Not a great name, but a decent name. But no, it isn't pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. And yet this is what we've got to work with. "Iambic" is the name for this sort of upbeat when it's found in a duple rhythm. Not in a triple rhythm. In a triple rhythm, there's another Greek word you can use, if you're inclined: "anapest." But in a double rhythm, a line that begins with an upbeat is iambic. If you follow me. Just saying all this creates a fog of brain damage.
But so much for the first part of the phrase, "iambic." Just set it and forget it. Don't worry about it. You can change an initial trochee to an iamb by adding an "And" or an "O." And you can flip around an iamb so that the line begins with a little triplet, or an eighth note and a sixteenth note, which happens a lot-as in "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." Or "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet." So the whole notion is fluid, and we don't need to dwell on it any longer. Some lines begin with an upbeat and some don't-that's all you need to know about the iamb.
BUT NOW FOR THE REAL THORNINESS: PENTAMETER. "All human things are subject to decay." That's the line. Then: "And when fate summons monarchs must obey." And you think, Okay, good, I see five stresses there, like five blackbirds on a power line.
Five little blackbirds. Ah, but there's a raven of a rest there at the end that you're not counting, my friend. If you say the two lines together, you'll hear the black raven. Listen for him:
If you leave out those raven squawks-those rests-and you only count the blackbirds on the line, you are not going to be able to say this couplet the way Mr. Dryden meant it to be said. Try it as a run-on. "All-human-things-are-subject-to-decay-and-when-fate-summons-" What? Who? Where am I? You see? It's just not right that way. You cannot have five stresses in a line and then jog straight on to the next line. If you do that, it sounds out of whack. It sounds horrible. It sounds like-enjambment.
Let's take another example of a heroic couplet. This one is from Samuel Johnson. He wrote it for his impoverished drunken friend Oliver Goldsmith.
You've got to have the rests! There's no question about it. If you don't have the rests, you don't have a proper couplet. These are six-beat lines. So-called iambic pentameter is in its deepest essence a six-beat line.
Actually no, I take that back. It's not. In its very deepest, darkest essence it's a three-beat line. Here's where we get to the nub of it. Because people really only hear threes and fours, not sixes. Let's take a look at how this works. And to do it, we're going to up the pace a little bit. We're going to say some of these lines flowingly and fast, listening for the way they truly fall. And as we do, we're going to tap our feet in rhythm. Let's try it. Get your foot tapping with me, in a nice slow walking pace.
With me now: One--two--three. One--two--three. "How small of all that human hearts endure (rest), the part which wars or kings can cause or cure (rest), all human things are subject to decay (rest), and when fate summons monarchs must obey (rest), that time of year thou mayst in me behold (rest), When yellow leaves or none or few do hang (rest), When I have fears that I may cease to be (rest), before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain (rest)." Are you with me? I feel like I'm making an exercise video.
What's happening is that if you tap your foot only to the big beats, you end up with a line of inner quadruplets chugging away in sync with three large stresses. You can chart it like this:
Looks like an air-balloon festival, does it not? But I hope it shows that what we call iambic pentameter is really, if you count the rest the way you must count it, a kind of slow waltz rhythm. You can leap around the room reciting so-called iambic pentameter to yourself and your leaps will fall in threes. You cannot make your leaps fall into fives. You need to add the rest. I'm telling you that this is true. No amount of reading and underlining any textbook about meter and seeing them go on and on about five beats is going to make that necessary sixth rest beat go away. It's there, and it's been there for centuries. And when poets forget that it's there, it hurts their poems.
15
MISTY AGAIN TODAY. A freakish mist lies over the land. My clothes are out on the clothesline, and they have been there for two days and they've started to get that wet-too-long smell.
Now, if I were a nineteenth-century poet, I would say that the freakish mist lay "o'er" the land. And that's one of those words, "o'er," that makes a modern reader feel ill. So what I do, to make the old poems feel true again-the good old poems-is very simple. This is another little tip for you, so get ready. I just pronounce "o'er" as "over," but I do it very fast, so you're gliding o'er the V, not really adding another syllable. Because that's really what it was, I think: it was a crude, printed representation of a subtle spoken elision that might well have had some of the vocal ghost of the V left in it.
There are rare times when it's absolutely necessary to say "o'er" without any V-as when, say, Macaulay rhymes it with "yore." But a lot of the time you can fudge it.