In poetry, a pentameter is a line of verse consisting of five metrical feet:
Be what you can if thus your heart so deem, For more the man will less the foible seem.
or
Where life expresses what it seldom feels, It there less frequent intimation yields.
Lines made up of five iambs and are called iambic pentameters. They contain ten syllables and five stresses. The iambic pentameter has been the basis for many forms of traditional poetry.
The pentameter scarcely exists except in conjunction with the hexameter, to which it always succeeds in elegaic verse.
The invention of the rigidly dactylic form was attributed by the Greeks to Archilochus.
The pentameter was always considered to add a melancholy air to verse, and it was especially beloved by the Greeks in those recitations (pai,liwSeirai) to the sound of the flute, which formed the earliest melodic performances at Delphi and elsewhere.
pentameter [Gr.,=measure of five], in prosody, a line to be scanned in five feet (see versification).
The pentametercouplet was used also by his imitators in Scotland, with the important difference that when the final e disappeared from speech the couplet became one of strict pentameters.
Blank verse, a succession of unrhymed iambic pentameters, is primarily an English form and has been used in the loftiest epic and dramatic verse from Shakespeare and Milton to the present.
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