Iambic pentameter

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The iambic Five lifter (also rising five strokes ) is a five iambics existing meter . In literatures with an accentuating verse principle it is a very common meter. In German it appears as a blank verse, mostly in stage poetry, and more rarely as a rhymed verse.

Since the second half of the 18th century, in the course of the rediscovery of William Shakespeare and medieval or medieval Romanesque models, in particular Dante and Petrarch , the iambic five-key has become one of the most widely used German verses that are practically unrivaled as stage verse and therefore has the Alexandriner , who was still the dominant meter in the German baroque, based on the model of French poetry of the Renaissance and Classical periods .

Is the iambic five-lifter broken regularly or predominantly after the second lift, d. H. divided by caesura , and provided with alternating male (stressed on the last syllable) and female (stressed on the penultimate syllable) rhymes at the end of the letter, it follows the model of the French vers commun , which, without regularly alternating rhyme, already exists in the French poetry of the Middle Ages was widespread, then in the French Renaissance, there gradually with regularly alternating rhyme, when a meter that was subordinate to the Alexandrian was still used and then also adapted and based on the model of the French Renaissance from the German poetry and poetics of the Baroque there was also subordinated to the Alexandrian. Example ( Johann Christian Günther , Abschiedsaria ):

You just keep silent, you half of my chest;
Because what you cry is blood from my heart.
I stagger like that and don't feel like doing anything anymore
As in fear and true pain ...

Freedom in handling the caesura, on the other hand, characterizes iambic five-lifters, which follow the example of the Italian hendecasyllable . The latter is set in Italian to feminine rhyme and is used in German in pronounced Italianizing poetry or post-poetry of Italian originals, e.g. B. the sonnets of Petrarch, also adapted with exclusively female rhymes. Example ( Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , travel supplies ):

I should wean myself from the glare of the looks
They shouldn't beautify my life anymore.
What is called skill cannot be reconciled -
I know it and stepped back in dismay.

Since German, in contrast to Italian, has a much more limited supply of female rhymes, this verse is also used in German mostly without specifying female rhymes, and then usually with alternating female and male rhymes.

The blank verse, which in English had developed from the French vers commun or perhaps also arose under Italian influence, had already been released from the rigid handling of the caesura in English, while the French custom of alternating cadence had none in the English blank verse and also in the English rhyming poetry found only sporadic expression. In the German blank verse the freedom of the caesura and the cadence of verse is adopted and, as in the English model, the prelude and the iambic filling of the verse are handled more freely than in rhymed iambic five-pointers, so that the first syllable of the verse can also be stressed and the regular sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables can be relaxed by remembering. Example (Ophelia in the Hamlet translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel , II.1):

When I sew in my room, all at once
Prince Hamlet - with his doublet completely torn,
No hat on his head, his stockings dirty
And hanging loose on my ankles;
As pale as his shirt, his knees trembling ...

In the Anglo-Saxon world, the iambic five-meter is also referred to as a pentameter , which is actually incorrect, since the iambic metron consists of two feet of verse, so an iambic pentameter would be ten-footed and not five-footed.

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