The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,Īnd the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows īut when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. ’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,Īs those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. In addition to this, lines of iambic pentameter might be end-stopped or they might be run-on lines.Įnd-stopped lines of iambic pentameter can be especially useful when writing didactic verse – poetry designed to instruct, or to impart a moral message – as Alexander Pope showed in his 1711 poem An Essay on Criticism: Of course, iambic pentameter as a term tells us nothing about whether the lines of poetry written in it are rhymed or not: blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, while heroic couplets are iambic pentameter verse lines rhymed aabbcc, and so on. This sort of thing happens far more often than we find ourselves lapsing naturally into trochaic tetrameter, for instance (but that’s a metre for another day). You HAD-n’t E-ven THOUGHT to SPEAK in VERSE. And SOME-times YOU can SPEAK in I-ambs WHEN