Please help! Are these 2 lines of poetry in iambic pentameter?

Question

Turn ing / and turn /ing in / the wide / ning gyre
The fal / con can / not hear / the fal / co ner

im sorry i phrased my question badly.. I'm not trying to put the poem in iambic pentameter, its from a poem that is in ip but the poem is very loose.. i wanted to give an example of a line that followed ip well and one that did not follow it... can you tell me how the syllables in the first line do read and not how they should read.. thanks for your help:)

Answer 1

Yes, although it's a kind of rocky start; you wind up mispronouncing "turning" as turnING.

Here's how it sounds as written:

turnING and TURNing IN the WIDEning GYRE

The second line is good.

Answer 2

Perceptive reading, esp. in your Additional Details.

jelliclepat has answered your specific question accurately, though a good reader does not accent the last syllable of "falconer," thereby creating a weak, pyrrhic foot at the end of that line.

Yeats, of course, is intentionally "roughening" the rhythm of his blank verse, creating a sense of conversation and a reflection of the modern age (the age of free verse).

The most regular examples of iambic pentameter are lines meant to be strong, pounding out their meaning, and some of these have feet that tend toward spondaic; for example,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere . . .

The best lack all convictions, while the worst . . .

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last . . .

Notice how the poem leads up to this strong, iambic pounding toward the end, with the vision of the mythic beast, but then immediately switches to trochaic in the last line, letting the beast slouch its way toward its spondaic birth at the end of the line.

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

You might notice too that Yeats begins the poem with just the slightest hint of a a rhyme scheme, though with false or half rhymes (consonance really):

gyre A
-ner A
hold B
world B
where A
drowned B

However, he then abandons rhyme at the end of lines altogether, though a strong use of consonance persists throughout the poem.

I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that Yeats lets the rhythm and "rhyme" of this poem spiral or "gyre," just as his vision of history does.

Answer 3

Iambic pentameter is a line that has five feet, each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. But you know that cause of the way you divided the lines...so, as the first answerer said-the first line is a little off but the second is definately iambic pentameter.

Answer 4

No, it's not iambic pentameter. Iambic means 'limping', and the second syllable has to be *naturally* strong, not forced. 'Turn-ING' forces the limp, whereas 'To be...or *not* to be...that *is* the question...' does not. There are five pairs of syllables, so it is pentameter, just not iambic pentameter.

Answer 5

Yes... the funniest thing we just learned about this in English. The person above is correct