This is about the secret history of the English language
- Dave Lucas
- April 12, 2019
- 1488
Relax.
This is not a column about iambic pentameter.
This is a column about the secret history of the English language.
But the story of English happens to be the story of iambic pentameter too.
Even if you know pentameter only as the meter you were supposed to know for your English class, you may have been hearing it — or speaking it — all along.
You may cringe nevertheless to recall that old, awkward horse galloping ba-bump ba-bump ba-bump ba-bump ba-bump, maybe counting out the stresses in Lord Tennyson’s “Tithonus:”
“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.”
Poets, on the other hand, love to count: syllables, stresses, grievances. The term meter describes the patterns we observe in poetry. Some poetries track syllables, others stresses (or accents). Some, like Modern English, count both.
We measure meter in poetic feet. An iamb — that ba-bump rhythm — is the most common foot in English. The names Michelle and Jamal, the words about and obey, are all iambs.
The term iambic pentameter, then, describes a line of five consecutive iambs, as in “the woods decay, the woods decay and fall.”
So far so good. But so what?
The matter of meter is more than what’s stressed and where. Rhythms and meters rise and fall across the poetic line but also through the historical lineages of peoples and nations. Those histories influence the way we speak and write our “own” English today.
So why pentameter in the first place? Why this pattern and not another? or none at all?
That story begins more than a thousand years ago in an English we cannot recognize today: the Old English (Anglo Saxon) of “Beowulf” and “The Sea-farer.”
Old English poems employ a heavily alliterated four-stress line. For instance, in Seamus Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf,” the Old English “mære mearc-stapa, | sē þe mōras hēold” becomes “haunting the marshes, marauding the heaths.”
This language, like the political and cultural fortunes of the island itself, changed forever with the Norman invasion of 1066. William, Duke of Normandy’s conquest of England, also was a conquest of English.
The French-speaking Normans “eliminated written English as the language of government and undermined it as the language of literature,” writes historian Robert Tombs, “and spoken English ceased to be the language of elite society.”
Instead, as Tombs notes, the Normans implemented Latin for most official written matters and their native French “for verbal communication among the new elites.” No political or cultural rupture in English history was more profound.
The three languages coexisted in tension among provincial, common “folk” (itself an Old English word). But the French and Latin influence eventually changed English into something the Anglo Saxons would not have recognized.
This linguistic hierarchy still persists in English, as Stephen Cushman taught us at the University of Virginia. Francophone and Latinate words — converse and dissertate — seem more sophisticated than Anglo Saxon talk.
Even our forbidden “four-letter words” are often Old English words for bodily functions. You don’t need me to mention the Old English versions of excrete and defecate, intercourse and copulate.
By the time the poet and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) served at the court of Richard II (1367-1400), French had waned amidst ongoing wars between the nations. But its influence remained, everywhere from the monarch’s motto (Dieu et mon droit — “God and my right”) to the forms of the new “Middle English” poetry.
Chaucer adapted European syllabic forms such as the French decasyllable and Italian endecasillabo to the accentual Old English line, and the iambic pentameter was born.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Chaucer’s Middle English is not yet ours, but his language makes ours possible.
Over the next 500 years iambic pentameter became all but the official meter of English poetry. Educated elites (Thomas Wyatt and John Milton) adopted the pentameter, and poets of humbler means (William Shakespeare and John Keats) made their names by making it their own.
Perhaps iambic pentameter mimics the rhythms of spoken English. Or perhaps they evolved together. But once you hear pentameter in poems, you’ll notice it elsewhere too: “but once you hear pentameter in poems” for instance.
Maybe you’ve also noticed the abundance of dead, white male poets in this history. So have I. And that fact highlights another more troubling element of the history of pentameter and English — another function of conquest, colonization and subjugation.
Iambic pentameter becomes synonymous with the English poetic tradition; that tradition has often itself been synonymous with systematic bigoted exclusion.
No wonder then the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s and others revolted against what Etheridge Knight called the “white aesthetic;” it is easy to understand iambic pentameter as one of the “master’s tools” that Audre Lorde said “will never dismantle the master’s house.”
For the poet Marilyn Nelson, however, those tools may yet build something new. “I know; I know,” she writes in her essay, “Owning the Masters,” “the tradition is the oppressor,” acknowledging the Black Arts purview. “Yet the once enslaved are heirs to the masters too.”
Nelson sees Phillis Wheatley — the first published African American woman — as one such example. Born in West Africa around 1753 and enslaved before the age of 10, Wheatley nevertheless learned to read and write and demonstrated her talent in the iambic pentameter of the American “masters.”
In Wheatley’s “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” she celebrates the independence of the new United States as an analogue for her own emancipation from slavery:
“No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.”
Nelson observes the irony that Wheatley found her voice in a language and tradition forced upon her:
“The Wheatleys ‘owned’ Phillis, but the Wheatley name lives now only because Phillis owns it.”
Nelson urges young poets of color to claim the whole English tradition as theirs, to “own the masters, all of them.”
Meanwhile, that old four-stress line of the Anglo Saxons did not disappear. Instead, it evolved into the meter of English folk poetry.
Those who could not read or write could still sing, pray and riddle in four-stress “ballad meter.” And poets who, like William Wordsworth, hoped to adopt “the real language of men” often chose that rhythm for their own lyrics.
You can hear ballad meter everywhere from the hymns of the Book of Common Prayer, to the poems of Emily Dickinson, to “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle.”
Today that structure survives in blues and bluegrass, rock and roll, and hip hop. If iambic pentameter is the meter you’re supposed to learn, the ballad is likely the rhythm you already know.
These meters and rhythms live in the rhythm of the breath, the heartbeat, the tapping toes of the impatient. They wait for those who know that to start again always means to put one foot in front of another.