Iambic pentameter

The iambic pentameter (also rising pentameter) is a verse meter consisting of five iambs. It is a very common meter in literatures with accentuating verse principles. In German, it occurs unrhymed as blank verse, primarily in stage poetry, and more rarely as rhymed verse.

Since the second half of the 18th century, in the course of the rediscovery of William Shakespeare and medieval or perceived medieval Roman models, especially Dante's and Petrarch's, the iambic pentameter has become one of the most widely used German verse types, practically unrivalled as stage verse, and has thus displaced the Alexandrian, which was still the dominant verse metre in German Baroque, following the example of French Renaissance and Classical poetry.

If the iambic pentameter is regularly or predominantly broken after the second heightening, i. e. divided by caesura, and provided at the end of the verse with alternating masculine (stressed on the last syllable) and feminine (stressed on the penultimate syllable) rhymes, it follows the model of the French vers commun, which, still without regularly alternating rhyme, was already widespread in French poetry of the Middle Ages, then in the French Renaissance, there gradually with regularly alternating rhyme, as a verse measure subordinate to the Alexandrian was further used and after the model of the French Renaissance then also by the German poetry and poetics of the Baroque adapted and there also the Alexandrian was subordinated. Example (Johann Christian Günther, Abschiedsaria):

Shut up, you half of my chest;

For what you weep is blood from my heart.

I'm so staggering, I don't feel like doing anything...

When at the fear and faithful pain ...

Freedom in the handling of the caesura, on the other hand, characterizes iambic pentameter, which follows the model of the Italian Endecasillabo. The latter is fixed in Italian on the female rhyme and is adapted in German in pronouncedly Italianizing poetry or re-poetry of Italian originals, e.g. Petrarch's sonnets, also with exclusively female rhymes. Example (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reisezehrung):

I shall wean myself from the glamour of looks,

My life shouldn't be embellished by them anymore.

What is called skill cannot be reconciled -

I know it well, and stepped back in dismay.

Since German, unlike Italian, provides a much more limited supply of feminine rhymes, however, even this verse is usually used in German without committing to feminine rhyme, and then usually with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes.

The blank verse, which had developed in English from the French vers commun or perhaps also originated under Italian influence, had already been freed in English from the rigid handling of the caesura, while the French usage of the alternating cadence found no expression in English blank verse and also only isolated expression in English rhyming poetry. In German blank verse the freedom of caesura and verse cadence is adopted, and in addition, as in the English model, the prelude and the iambic filling of the verse are handled more freely than in rhymed iambic pentameter, so that the first syllable of the verse may also be stressed and the regular sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables may be relaxed in the sense of the verse. Example (Ophelia in the Hamlet translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel, II.1):

As I was sewing in my room, all of a sudden.

Prince Hamlet - with his doublet all ripped,

No hat on his head, stockings dirty

And untied hanging on the ankles;

Pale as his shirt, shaking with his knees ...

In the Anglo-Saxon world, the iambic pentameter is also called pentameter, which is actually incorrect, since the iambic metron consists of two verse feet, so an iambic pentameter would be ten-footed and not five-footed.