Poetry Feast

An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry, most commonly in pentameter.
In accentual-syllabic verse we could describe an iamb as a foot that goes like this:

It can often be seen written like this:

The word ‘attempt’ is a natural iamb:

Iambic pentameter is one of the most commonly used measures in English poetry. A line of iambic pentameter comprises five consecutive iambs.

A. B. Paterson wrote much of his poetry in iambic heptameter, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner also conforms to this stress pattern (although it is usually written as though it were composed of lines alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter).

The reverse of an iamb is called a trochee.

Examples

Pentameter

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. (Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)

Hexameter

I s’pose the flats is pretty green up there in Ironbark. (A. B. Paterson, The Man from Ironbark)

Key:

• Non-bold = unstressed syllable
• Bold = stressed syllable