It was written in rhyming couplets of iambic heptameter. The next significant translation was by George Sandys, produced from 1621–6,Gillespie et al. 2004, pp. 208–09. which set the poem in heroic couplets, a metre that would subsequently become dominant in vernacular English epic and in English translations.Lyne 2006, p. 254.
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Ed. > J.M. Cohen. London: Willyam Seres, 1567. Print. (4.143–9) Written in rhyming couplets of iambic heptameter (fourteeners), the book's full title was The Fyrst Fower Bookes of P. Ovidius Nasos Worke, Entitled Metamorphosis, Translated Oute of Latin into Englishe Meter (1565). In 1567 Golding completed all fifteen books of Ovid's poem.
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The Man from Ironbark bronze sculpture by Tessa Wallis "The Man From Ironbark" is a poem by Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson (Andrew Barton Paterson). It is written in the iambic heptameter. It was first published in The Bulletin on 17 December 1892. The poem relates the experiences of a man from the Bush who visit Sydney and becomes the subject of a practical joke by a mischievous barber.
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In poetry, a fourteener is a line consisting of 14 syllables, which are usually made of seven iambic feet for which the style is also called iambic heptameter. It is most commonly found in English poetry produced in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fourteeners often appear as rhymed couplets, in which case they may be seen as ballad stanza or common metre hymn quatrains in two rather than four lines. The term may also be used as a synonym for quatorzain, a 14-line poem, such as a sonnet.
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Less common, but frequently important for the variety and energy they bring to a line, are the monosyllabic foot (weak) and the spondee (STRONG STRONG). The terms for line length follow a regular pattern: a Greek prefix denoting the number of feet and the root "meter" (for "measure"): monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, and octameter (lines having more than eight feet are possible but quite rare). Another useful term is caesura, for a natural pause within a line. Meter and line length are not formulas for successful lines of poetry.
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In English poetry the type of meter that resembles, somehow, this Greek Political verse is the one called "iambic heptameter" or a "fourteener". Such verses can be found in the English poetry, mainly of the 16th century but in other cases as well. An early example is the first translation into English of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (1567) - credited to Arthur Golding. For example, (from Book 2, THE SECONDE BOOKE OF OVIDS METAMORPHOSIS): The Princely Pallace of the Sunne stood gorgeous to beholde On stately Pillars builded high of yellow burnisht golde, Beset with sparckling Carbuncles that like to fire did shine.
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Gage, History and Antiquities of Suffolk, pp. 19-23 (Google), with Plate facing p. 22. Beneath the canopy, a brass memorial of composite construction is set into the upright wall at the back.Howard, Visitation of Suffolke, II, pp. 235-37 (Internet Archive) and Plate following p. 244 (not displayed in available scans). In the lower part are two large brass rectangular plates set adjacent, containing an epitaph to Sir Clement Heigham in 44 lines of English rhymed heptameter couplets,A Concise Description of Bury St. Edmund's and Its Environs (Longman and Co., London 1827), pp. 19-20 (Google).
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The play is composed in the rhymed fourteener or heptameter verse that was popular in its era. When the heroine Neronis (daughter of Patranius, late King of the Isle of Strange Marshes) enters the Forest of Marvels in male disguise, she speaks this: > As hare the hound, as lamb the wolf, as fowl the falcon's dint, > So do I fly from tyrant he, whose heart more hard than flint > Hath sack'd on me such hugy heaps of ceaseless sorrows here, > That sure it is intolerable, the torments that I bear. The meter has a jog-trot rhythm to a modern ear, but poets like Sidney and Arthur Golding employed it for works of serious intent.
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The play is written in a very rough and uneven verse, a jumble of alexandrine and heptameter or fourteener meter: ::But senior Mercadorus tell me, did ye serve me well or no? ::That having gotten my money would seem the country to forego: ::You know I sent you two thousand ducats for three months' space, ::And ere the time came you got another thousand by flattery and your smooth face. ::So when the time came that I should have received my money, ::You were not to be found but was fled out of the country: ::Surely if we that be Jews should deal so one with another, ::We should not be trusted again of our own brother....Spelling and punctuation modernized.
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The title of Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break" is sometimes cited as a molossus, but in context it can only be three separate feet: :Break, / break, / break, :At the foot / of thy crags, / O sea; :But the ten- / -der grace / of the day / that is dead :Will never / come back / to me. Clement Wood proposes as a more convincing instance: great white chief, of which an example occurs in "Ballads of a Cheechako" by Robert W. Service: :For thus the / Great White Chief / hath said, / "In all / my lands / be peace". However, given that the previous lines in the stanza are constructed predominantly in iambic heptameter – a common form for ballad stanza – it is more likely that the meter appears as: :For thus / the Great / White Chief / hath said, / "In all / my lands / be peace". The double stress on "White Chief" comes from the substitution of a spondee in place of the iamb, mirroring previous substitutions in the poem, rather than a molossus.
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Two centuries later, in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," John Keats expressed his appreciation for what he called the "loud and bold" quality of Chapman's translation, which he implicitly contrasted with the more prestigious but more tightly controlled heroic couplets of Alexander Pope's 18th-century translation, thereby using one type of fourteener (a sonnet) to comment on the other (iambic heptameter). Samuel Johnson in his Lives of The English Poets comments upon the importance of fourteeners to later English lyric forms saying "as these lines had their caesura always at the eighth syllable, it was thought in time commodious to divide them; and quatrains of lines alternately consisting of eight and six syllables make the most soft and pleasing of our lyric measures".Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets—Dryden, 1779 These quatrains of eight and six syllables (or more loosely, lines of 4, 3, 4, and 3 beats) are known as common meter. C. S. Lewis, in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, castigates the 'lumbering' poulter's measure (p. 109).
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