10 Reasons Why the Iambic Pentameter is Not Like the Human Heartbeat

On an idea about poetry that needs to die

The human heart, not writing iambic pentameters

As exam season nears, I’ve been trying to help my daughter with GCSE English Literature. One issue we keep coming up against, though, is that something widely taught about poetry in school — and here I start to grumble in an unhelpful way — is not true.

The poem is written in iambic pentameter, a metre often said to represent the heartbeat.

Iambic pentameter creates a strong rhythm in the poem, which could reflect the heartbeat of the narrator as she expresses her love.

The rhythm of iambic pentameter is like a heartbeat, with one soft beat and one strong beat repeated five times.

I found these at random by Googling revision guides. The idea that the iambic pentameter is “like a heartbeat” is everywhere, including some pretty respectable places (the third quotation is from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s website).

But it’s not true. And it makes me grumble because — although it sounds like an intuitive explanation for the most common rhythm in English poetry — its effect is to obscure what’s actually happening when a poet writes in this way.

Here, then, is why I get so regularly stressed (sorry) about the claim that the iambic pentameter is the pacemaker of English poetry:

1. They don’t sound the same

The iambic pentameter goes de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM

The human heartbeat goes lub-dub… lub-dub… lub-dub… lub-dub… lub-dub

One of these things is not like the other.

2. A double beat and a pause is not an iamb

A heartbeat is two sounds of slightly different pitch and duration (S1/S2) with a common cause: reverberation of the blood as alternating heart valves close [yes, I am consulting Wikipedia]. Lub-dub is a double “beat” heard between pauses when the blood flows.

An iamb, by contrast, is a metrical foot made up of an unstressed and a stressed syllable. An iambic pentameter is five de DUMs together. Every second syllable sounds a slight “beat” within the flow of meaning, which follows the stress placement of English pronunciation e.g.

The classics can console. But not enough.

(Derek Walcott, “Sea Grapes”)

There are subtly different ways to hear the meaning, and so the spoken emphasis, of this line. The relationship of poetic metre to performance is like keeping the beat in a piece of music: it’s there all the time, but it’s not the only thing a musician plays. There would obviously be some kind of pause at the full stop here (the technical term for this is a “caesura”). But no-one would pause between “cla-” and “-ssics”. Iambs are not lub-dubs.

3. An iamb is not a spondee

A line of verse that did sound something like a heartbeat would be made up of pairs of stressed syllables (the metrical foot known as a “spondee”) divided by caesuras. There is a line a bit like this in Hamlet:

Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing

But this is Shakespeare writing deliberately badly: it’s from the wooden tragedy that the travelling Players put on at the Danish court.

4. Line breaks don’t show on heart monitors

Another problem with the claim that the rhythm of iambic pentameter is like a heartbeat: the heart doesn’t beat in fives. Poetic metre is sometimes called a “measure” because it measures rhythm into regular line lengths, such as pentameters. Many readers will hear a slight pause at a line break, marking its measure. An ECG monitor just rolls on.

5. An iambic pentameter is not always an iambic pentameter

The iambic pentameter is not five separate pieces: it’s a unit of rhythm in itself. And poets use it to build larger wholes: stanzas, sonnets, verse paragraphs. When this happens, you also start to get irregular lines, to keep things interesting.

Take, for example, the opening of Stevie Smith’s poem about her childhood home. The first two lines are fairy-tale regular. But the third line disrupts: first by a caesura after “And they were brave”, then by a dropped beat (“For although”), and finally by the spondee of Fear at the door (“knocked loud”):

It was a house of female habitation,
Two ladies fair inhabited the house,
And they were brave. For although Fear knocked loud
Upon the door, and said he must come in,
They did not let him in.

(Stevie Smith, “A House of Mercy”)

A line in a poem written iambic pentameter can be shorter or longer than ten syllables, and can have more or less than five beats, evenly or unevenly distributed. If a doctor heard the kind of metrical irregularity you get in iambic pentameter in your lub-dubs, you’d be in critical care.

6. Poets don’t write with a stethoscope

As you read this, your heart is (hopefully) beating. But you can’t hear it. The lub-dub is what a doctor hears through a stethoscope. It’s possible — if you’ve just had a run or a cup of coffee — that you are aware of your pulse. But that’s not audible as a lub-dub or a de DUM either. So to say the iambic pentameter could reflect the heartbeat of the narrator as she expresses her love is, at best, physiologically unlikely.

7. Iambic pentameter was the Elizabethan microphone

The mistake of the iambic heartbeat myth is to assume that poetic form needs a natural explanation. But poetry is an art, not a bodily function. So the most helpful analogies see it as man-made. Marshall McLuhan, for example, in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), compares the use of iambic pentameter by the Elizabethan dramatists to modern mass entertainment inventions such as the “P.A. system” and even the cinematic “close up” — which he considers “alike in the intensity of amplification and exaggeration of feeling”.

I particularly like McLuhan’s idea of iambic pentameter as an Elizabethan public address system because it identifies the effect rather than the cause: it makes the speaking voice more resonant.

8. That way, Dan Brown lies

The desire to hear a heartbeat in a line of verse is the desire to make everything correspond. But that’s also the desire of the conspiracy theorist. The funniest thing ever written about iambic pentameter is this passage from The Da Vinci Code:

Before Langdon could even ponder what ancient password the verse was trying to reveal, he felt something far more fundamental resonate within him—the meter of the poem. Iambic pentameter.

Langdon had come across this meter often over the years while researching secret societies across Europe, including just last year in the Vatican Secret Archives. For centuries, iambic pentameter had been a preferred poetic meter of outspoken literati across the globe, from the ancient Greek writer Archilochus to Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Voltaire—bold souls who chose to write their social commentaries in a meter that many of the day believed had mystical properties. The roots of iambic pentameter were deeply pagan.

Iambs. Two syllables with opposite emphasis. Stressed and unstressed. Yin yang. A balanced pair. Arranged in strings of five. Pentameter. Five for the pentacle of Venus and the sacred feminine.

“It’s pentameter!” Teabing blurted, turning to Langdon. “And the verse is in English! La lingua pura!”

It’s hard to choose my favourite sentence here, but it may simply be the one where he gets the iamb the wrong way round (“Stressed and unstressed”).

9. The iambic pentameter rolls through all things

“But” — I hear you ask — what about Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, when he remembers what it’s like to remember a favourite landscape?

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart…

“And felt along the heart”: isn’t this proof that the iamb and the heartbeat are twins?

Well, no. One of the beautiful things about “Tintern Abbey” is how often Wordsworth implies a parallel between his heartfelt pentameters and other rhythms, such as:

the ambient rhythm of rivers

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur

the visual rhythm of landscape

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild

the invisible rhythm of life itself

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things

If anything, the poem suggests that the iambic pentameter is the original rhythm of the universe — the heartbeat just its human echo.

10. The heart doesn’t care about your feelings

Denise Riley’s poem “It Really Is the Heart” is a rare example of a poem about the real live heart. It is not written in iambic pentameter. It begins:

The heart does hurt

and that’s no metaphor

and it ends:

but it does hurt

top mid-left

under my shirt

with its atrocious beat.

“Atrocious”: from Latin atrox, “fierce, savage, cruel”. This is the truth about the supposedly sensitive heart: whatever we are feeling, it keeps hammering out its spondees (“does hurt… does hurt…”). Sometimes faster, sometimes slower but basically: heartlessly. As Riley writes elsewhere:

It is a pump, impersonal in its lub-dup shunt.

Art is made against the heart: it’s only by imagining other rhythms that we represent our feelings, order them, intensify them, and bring them to some kind of conclusion.

NOTES

For a short, interesting discussion of art actually inspired by the human heartbeat — none of it poetry — click here: https://www.npr.org/2014/06/17/322800415/the-human-heart-and-its-rhythmic-magnificence

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I’m not the first critic to have made this argument. Here’s Derek Mong in 2016: https://kenyonreview.org/2016/04/iambic-pentameter-nothing-heart/

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A helpful explanation of why the heart says lub-dup by the kind of doctor who would actually know: https://www.ft.com/content/85842670-486f-11e2-a1c0-00144feab49a