I don't know how much you know about the rules of scansion, so I beg your pardon if I'm telling you something you already know.
Iambic pentameter doesn't necessarily have ten syllables to every line (Shakespeare plays fast and loose with it on a regular basis; consider, "To be or not to be, that is the question," which has eleven). It's the five stresses per line that matter (and even then, some lines may have four or six--to be a good poet, you have to know the rules; to be a great poet, you have to know how to break them).
Now, I suck at English scansion, so I can't tell you whether "The Second Coming" is blank verse or not, or what you call it if it isn't. All I can tell you is that the ten syllables per line is a rule of thumb; English poetry is almost never as rigorous as Japanese.
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Date: 2004-09-08 06:48 pm (UTC)Iambic pentameter doesn't necessarily have ten syllables to every line (Shakespeare plays fast and loose with it on a regular basis; consider, "To be or not to be, that is the question," which has eleven). It's the five stresses per line that matter (and even then, some lines may have four or six--to be a good poet, you have to know the rules; to be a great poet, you have to know how to break them).
Now, I suck at English scansion, so I can't tell you whether "The Second Coming" is blank verse or not, or what you call it if it isn't. All I can tell you is that the ten syllables per line is a rule of thumb; English poetry is almost never as rigorous as Japanese.