Can you explain the pentameter?

Question

What are the stresses (stressed syllables) and how do you know where they are ??

Answer 1

Iambic pentameter is a meter in poetry. It refers to a line consisting of five iambic feet. The word "pentameter" simply means that there are five feet in the line; iambic pentameter is a line comprising five iambs.
An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. We could write the rhythm like this: n
daDUM
A line of iambic pentameter is five of these in a row:
daDUMdaDUMdaDUMdaDUMdaDUM
We can notate this with a 'x' mark representing an unstressed syllable and a '/' mark representing a stressed syllable[1]. In this notation a line of iambic pentameter would look like this:
x/x/x/x/x/

Answer 2

The previous respondent did a good job of describing Iambic Pentameter.

As for where the stresses fall...in a REGULAR line of Iambic Pentameter verse the stressed syllables will be the even-numbered ones: #2, #4, #6, #8, #10. A "regular" line of verse, by the way, may have either 10 syllables ("masculine ending") or 11 syllables ("feminine ending").

Here's a basic bit of advice for working with the verse form. Going in, you should ASSUME that every line is regular. Apply the basis formula (da DA da DA da DA da DA da DA) to it, and see whether the sense emerges. If the line absolutely CAN'T work with that format, then you man assume that it's IRREGULAR...which opens up another conversation altogether.

Good luck.

Answer 3

Previous answers are extremely informative; I just want to add a bit about what stressed syllables are.

A stressed syllable is one that you say louder or with more force than the others. In a dictionary it'll be marked with an apostrophe or written in all caps, like "a-pos'-tro-phe" or "a-POS-tro-phe".

You can figure out which syllable is stressed by saying it out loud and over-stressing one syllable. If you say "syl-la-BLE" or "syl-LA-ble" it'll sound silly, but if you say "SYL-la-ble" it sound just about right.

You can say one-syllable words in a stressed or unstressed way, so in Hamlet's famous "to BE or NOT to BE" it sounds normal, but if you say "TO be OR not TO be" it sounds all wrong.

That doesn't mean you have to say it like that in performance. In fact, the great thing about iambic pentameter is that it mimics the way you speak naturally. Think of the pentameter as a guide to your performance, not as an iron, rigid rule. (English naturally falls into iambs like that, because its words are commonly either one syllable that can be stressed any way you like or two syllables with one accent. Read too much Shakespeare and you'll find yourself talking in iambs all the time!)

Shakespeare wasn't really rigid about his iambic pentameter either. He often added an extra unstressed syllable at the end:

to BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUES-tion

(If I remember correctly that's called a "female" meter, but I can't dig up a reference at the moment.) Shakespeare did it a lot, and he'd also fiddle with pronunications:

it IS the EAST and JU-li-et IS the SUN

where "Juliet" becomes kind of a two syllable word, "JUL-yet".

Shakespeare also pronounced his words differently depending on how he needed them. From Midsummer:

a-NON his THIS-be MUST be AN-swer-ED

(with "answered" pronounced as three syllables") and from Tempest:

i HAVE be-DIMMED the NOON-tide SUN

with "bedimmed" pronounced as two syllables. Some editions write "bedimm'd" to let you know that Shakespeare indended it that way.