In his recent and very kind write-up of CWKB, Frank @hecker mentioned in passing the common idea that 'iambic pentameter' is English's 'most natural' verse metre. Now, I don't think Frank endorses this idea—he carefully calls it 'claimed'—and I don't endorse it either, but it crops up pretty often, so I figured prodding it might prove fruitful.
1.
Keeping things brutally brief, the rising five-beat line has five beats (/ / / / /) in ten syllables, with the metrical pattern rising from offbeat to beat (x/). The most typical pattern therefore runs x/x/x/x/x/. See my past post on the topic if you want more details and some examples.
2.
The crudest form of the natural quality idea turns up in the simple statement that the rising five-beat line is 'like a heartbeat', sometimes with the chaser that it therefore recalls what the developing child hears in the womb(!). I've even met this one in students' essays, though only a few times, and that's a blessed mercy. One can see how this idea might appeal.
I feel caution about assuming that humans—or even just first-language Anglophones—consistently perceive a heartbeat as offbeat–beat. Let's grant for argument's sake that that holds, though.
Even if that holds, the human heart doesn't operate in blocks of five cycles. If the rising offbeat-to-beat x/ pattern resembles a heartbeat, then all rising English metres excluding double offbeats must equally resemble a heartbeat. A rising three-beat line (x/x/x/) resembles a heartbeat; a rising fourteener or septenary line (x/x/x/x/|x/x/x/) resembles a heartbeat, and so forth.
Plus, English verse in the five-beat rising metre often yields lines in which the word-boundaries give a falling impression:
a thousand thousand kinds of death attend
This line stays wholly orthodox (x/x/x/x/x/), but listeners, with primarily lexical attention, are likely to report that the rhythm (rather than metre) they hear for this line's first two thirds is falling: that line-initial a doesn't impinge much on attention, and we have two firm /x words—in fact, the same word twice, which in this line underlines the effect particularly. If x/ resembles a heartbeat, then much of the impression that this line gives off does not resemble a heartbeat.
So we can scrap the simple version of the 'natural' thesis.
3.
It's possible that in some senses the five-beat line is less natural.
Exploring this will require a little digging.
3.i
Chaucer probably invented the five-beat line, in the late fourteenth century, using a mixture of French and (importantly) Italian models. Up to that point, English verse had typically come in lines with four beats.
That statement holds true across metrical traditions. In alternating metres, four-beat lines formed the mainstay of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English verse, especially extended poems:
Many accusers þar sal be þan
To accuse þam befor þat domesman
(The Prick of Conscience, 5422–3 (Hanna-Wood numbering); middle of the fourteenth century.)
Hwi dostu that unwihtes doth?
Thu singest a nyht and nouht a day.
(The Owl and the Nightingale, Jesus College MS version, ll. 218–19; later thirteenth century.)
But alliterative verse too has a four-beat, or four-lift, structure:
Ferkes in with the fowl | in his fair handes
(Alliterative Morte Arthure, late fourteenth century, l. 2071.)
Howel heom kepte; | Walwain heom imette
(Layamon's Brut, c. late twelfth century or early thirteenth century, l. 13834.)
Offa gemælde, | æscholt asceoc
(The Battle of Maldon*, late tenth century or eleventh century, l. 230.)
Hweþræ þer fusæ | fearran kwomu
(The Dream of the Rood, l. 57, transliterated from its partial appearance in runes on the Ruthwell Cross, pushing us at least as far back as the eighth century—young for poetry per se, but old for English poetry!)
These four examples use at least three different metrical schemes, and the linear presentation might deceive: plenty of scholars, me included, would if push came to shove file Layamon as an offshoot rather than as a developmental link between Old English alliterative metre and the alliterative metre of the late fourteenth century. But the systems at play in these lines are all cognate with each other, and they all at base rely on a model of four lifts (or beats, or staves) split evenly across two half-lines.
Even the septenary and fourteener tradition (roughly, x/x/x/x/|x/x/x/) of alternating verse probably existed in relation to the four-beat model. Derek Attridge makes a (to my mind) pretty convincing case that in septenary verse each three-beat line has an implicit fourth beat, and that you can often hear this today in performance (of non-melodic verse, but also in song), if you pay attention to duration.
For strong hit is to stonde longe, | and lyht hit is to falle
(Poema Morale, Jesus College MS version, l. 310; earlier thirteenth century or later twelfth century.)
Four-beat lines—alliterative or alternating—satisfy because the mind can cope with hearing and totting up a count of four very easily, and because they split easily into two balanced halves.
3.ii
Roughly a generation after Chaucer's death, poets adopted the five-beat line as the vehicle for aspirational verse. In the fifteenth century, they experimented with it in various ways that literary history has largely ignored since; in the sixteenth, they standardised it; by the sixteenth century's end, it had become the metre; if someone who doesn't read a lot of poetry can name a poet from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, that poet probably wrote a majority of their work in five-beat lines.
Yet much, I suspect the majority, of the verse written remained four-beat or septenary. Probably not by coincidence, these forms proliferated in the verse that large numbers of people liked.
In many hymns, for instance:
When pain and anguish seize me, Lord,
All my support is from thy word
(Watts, 'When pain and anguish seize me, Lord'.)
The ballad tradition is absolutely rife with septenaries:
O what like was his hawk, his hawk?
Or what like was his hound?
(Child 263A.5.)
The septenary is the 'Common Metre' of other hymns:
When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies
(Watts, 'When I can read my title clear'.)
Which, incidentally, underlies quite a lot of Dickinson, whose work has a complex relationship to hymn metres as she had a complex relationship with churchgoing:
Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
(Dickinson, 'Surgeons must be very careful'.)
This tendency continues. I googled up a list of popular songs from 2022 and the first one I clicked on has septenary lines:
Every time you come around, | you know I can't say no
(Ed Sheeran, 'Bad Habits'.)
This Ed Sheeran fellow and the twelfth-century poet of Poema Morale do very similar things.
4.
So patterns of four have shown remarkable persistence, in the alliterative line up to its death, in the four-beat alternating line, and in the septenary. The four-beat alternating line is more natural than the five-beat alternating line, if by natural we mean something like 'rooted in the brain's assimilation of heard verse'.
Of course, the four-beat alternating line is itself less natural than the various Old and Middle English alliterative models, in that alliterative verse metre is the tradition which English had when English became English, the tradition with an organic line of descent back, while all alternating English verse represents a metrical tradition borrowed from other, then-more-prestigious, tongues. But we brush a dangerous road here: any idea of nativist virtue attached to alliterative verse must be spurious. And, for all that poetry occurs very widely at different times and in different places, perhaps all poetry has an unnatural quality.
But to return to the idea that 'iambic pentameter is English's most natural metre'. I think training and the metrical force of the modern English canon—though not, significantly, the premodern English canon—obscure the great artifice behind the five-beat rising line. It joins the long list of culturally-constructed things that the Michael Goves of the world want us to think happened naturally.
5.
I think you can make a case, though, that the five-beat line is more conversational.
Because it lacks an obvious, balanced position for a regular, universal, metrical caesura, the audience and poet in five-beat-line poetry dance around the question of where the rhetorical caesura in any given line might be. Some lines lack a pause entirely, but many split either 3+2 or 2+3.
You can split a five-beat line after three beats, for three-two:
I burn to muster troops, | to storm the horse (3|2)
Or after two, for two-three:
Back down I leap, | and hit the house alarm (2|3)
You can have the syntax march in lockstep with the five-beat line, so that each metrical line is a statement:
With speeding tread through family park I haste,
on course preferring thickest-wooded parts.
I thumb through frequencies and airwaves plumb.
The jammed and shattered channels yield no speech.
That state itself a grim-voiced tale can tell:
But even then a ghost of a pause hovers in most lines:
With speeding tread | through family park I haste,
on course preferring | thickest-wooded parts.
I thumb through frequencies | and airwaves plumb.
The jammed and shattered channels | yield no speech.
That state itself | a grim-voiced tale can tell:
And where that ghostly pause leads its wavering life varies. And in this variation comes greater flexibility, a greater sense of the sentence unspooling without the four-beat line's thump and predictable metrical caesura, instead in a structure that's always off balance.
(A separate consideration, relevant to rhyming verse: compared to four-beat lines, five-beat lines require fewer rhymes per words written, and intrude on the audience's minds with rhyme less often.)
Now, 'conversationality' is not inherently good or bad. But it is interesting. While four-beat structures have stayed common—the norm, I think—in verse as experienced by most people, in popular song, ballad, advertising jingles &c, aspirational poetry has, through the history of later Middle and modern English, tended to drift more and more away from heard regularity.
In a sense, I suppose this is one kind of answer to a question people sometimes throw up when English poetics stands in global perspective: why is so much formal English poetry so formally undemanding? A set of language prestige gaps and contingent historical accidents of rule hauled English in that direction. Had things fallen out differently, perhaps we'd all be writing in stanzas like those of 'Three Dead Kings', which require the poet to marshal:
- Alliteration both inside lines and between them, pairing them up.
- Interlaced end-rhyme.
- Matches of the onsets and codas of syllables but not of those syllables' nuclei.
- Matches of the codas of syllables only, producing terminal consonance.
- Regular alliterative metre.
(Sounds like a lot of work, though, doesn't it?)
6.
Why five beats, and not six? The brain has limits on how long you can ask it to keep counting, if smaller units are available. Six-beat lines have balance, and get reanalysed as balanced trimeter; seven is unbalanced but gets reanalysed as septenary (thus the name!), which brings us back to four beats. Guess what happens if you try to write eight-beat lines in English.
Why rising? After all, it's still quite possible to write English verse in falling metre, and people do. The Dickinson snippet I quoted above is falling, not rising (its importance to my argument at that point is its beat-count!). Two big reasons that I know of.
One is English's gradual shift away from relying on word-endings. English is a less synthetic and more analytic language than it used to be, and also than most other Indo-European languages.
As word-endings lost importance, they atrophied; the language has kept some, but others have disappeared, leaving bare monosyllable content words behind. English shifted to rely more on often-monosyllabic function words that usually precede other words.
That shift meant more x/ blocks. An amusing example of this—I take it from Geoffrey Russom—is Beowulf line 1507a:
hringa þengel
If you translate this into present-day English but don't rearrange its syntax, you get:
of rings the lord
…and its stress pattern has exactly flipped in translation. With more function-word-then-content-word patterns, English developed more x/ building-blocks for verse.
Of course, English retains plenty of falling (/x) words, especially in its core everyday vocabulary. But these can be managed in a predominantly rising structure, and the tension between word-boundaries and beat arrivals can be a source of pleasure itself:
A thousand thousand kinds of death attend.
The second reason has to do with the relative prestige of languages. For much of its history, English was far from the most important tongue in England. English poets from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on had more and more and more French-derived loan-words to deploy.
Although French as spoken by the French, even quite early, lacks outright lexical stress—an oddity among Indo-European languages—French as spoken by the premodern English tended to have it. Also, French words pronounced without noticeable stress contours by a French speaker often sound to Anglophones as though the stress is 'wrong': if someone says stature to me with levelled stress, it sounds to me like stature because my brain wants the Anglicised stature.
So there're lots of French-derived words, and those words tend to have a x/ pattern in English. Lines with a rising skeleton fit nicely with these words, and the two-syllable French flourish at a line's end—like, say, attend!—becomes a mainstay for the aspirational English poet.
