"Iambic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the post, brother to the man and woman that resided there. He took Bonner moose-hunting and wolf- trapping; and, in return, Bonner resurrected a battered and way-worn volume and made him friends with Shakespeare, till Sandy declaimed iambic pentameters to his sled-dogs whenever they waxed mutinous. And of the long evenings they played cribbage and talked and disagreed about the universe, the while Jees Uck rocked matronly in an easy-chair and darned their moccasins ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... the verse returns to the strict iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony with the meaning ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... be seen (1)that each half-line contains two, and only two, feet; (2)that each foot contains one, and only one, primary stress; (3)that A is trochaic, Biambic; (4)that C is iambic-trochaic; (5)that D and E consist of the same ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... sources, pass fluently over the tongue; but can they be considered other than a cento? Swarms of English schoolboys, at this day, would not feel very proud to adopt them. In fact, we remember (at a period say twelve years later than this) some iambic verses, which were really composed by a boy, viz. son of Dr Prettyman, (afterwards Tomline,) bishop of Winchester, and, in earlier times, private tutor to Mr Pitt; they were published by Middleton, first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... or Alexandra of Lycophron, one of the seven "Pleiades" who adorned the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus (third century B.C.), is "an iambic monologue of 1474 verses, in which Cassandra is made to prophesy the fall of Troy ... with numerous other historical events, ... ending with [the reign of] Alexandra the Great." Byron had probably read a translation of the Cassandra ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... naming the meter of a poem two things are considered: First the character of the feet, and second, the number of feet. In this poem the feet are iambic and there are four of them, consequently we name the meter of this poem iambic tetrameter. Whenever you hear those words you think of a poem whose meter is exactly like ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was engaged in a lively conversation with two Samian Greeks: the celebrated worker in metals, sculptor and goldsmith Theodorus, and the Iambic poet Ibykus of Rhegium, who had left the court of Polykrates for a time in order to become acquainted with Egypt, and were bearers of presents to Amasis from their ruler. Close to the fire lay Philoinus of Sybaris, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... has twelve syllables, mostly (iambics) as in our blank verse. But blank verse has only ten syllables: 'I cannot tell what you and other men.' If one adds two syllables one gets the Greek iambic verse, thus: 'I cannot tell what you and other men believe.' The Chorus in the Helena uses various rhythms such as are found in the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... me to cover the scroll down to the stick with the iambic lines I had begun a song promised ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... loadstone that was placed on the right side the following iambic verse was curiously engraven in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... flourished in the reign of Tiberius (14-37). He was originally a slave. His fables are ninety-seven in number, and are written in iambic verse. ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... charms and Dorian Lyric Odes, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, Blind Melesigenes thence Homer call'd, Whose Poem Phoebus challeng'd for his own. 260 Thence what the lofty grave Tragoedians taught In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd In brief sententious precepts, while they treat Of fate, and chance, and change in human life; High actions, and high passions best describing; Thence to the famous Orators repair, Those antient, whose resistless ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... quantity, there is scarcely any fixed law. The meters may be timed as the minstrel chooses—fast or slow—and the iambic current checked in reverted eddy, as ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... raise hell if they didn't take some action against this blank Bolshevism, and furthermore that this new Legion was going to be the most tremendous organization that the U.S.A. had ever seen." If he had told me that Swinburne's Faustine was written in iambic hexameter it would have sounded more like old times. But here was a new man, strong and virile, intensely interested in ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... made by Westphal and others into the metrical system of the Vedic Aryans, the Turanians, and the Greeks, since the fact that their metres were the same implies a common origin. The demonstration is complete, if we compare the iambic metre of Archilochus with that of the Vedic hymns. There are in both three series of iambuses—the dimeter, the cataleptic trimeter, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... over almost without a word of comment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetry must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply no achievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors of the great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, the English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that Sappho invented ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... invented for each occasion, they have also a measure to suit the transition in the tone of mind from the dialogue to the lyric, the anapest; and two for the dialogue itself, one of which, by far the most usual, the iambic trimeter, denoted the regular progress of the action, and the other, the trochaic tetrameter, was expressive of the impetuousness of passion. It would lead us too far into the depths of metrical science, were we to venture at present on a more minute account of the structure and significance ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Canticum.—There was no chorus in Roman comedy, but part of the play was set to music and sung to the flute. Some MSS. denote this by C (Canticum); while DV (usually placed only over iambic senarii) denotes dialogue or soliloquy (Diverbium). Iambic senarii were spoken; other metres were sung; but the scenes in septenarii stood midway between the dialogue and the canticum. Only about a fourth of Plautus' verses are in iambic senarii, while in Terence, who followed ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... any thing in Marlowe that does. In the passage quoted, however, (and there are many more like it,) we have the rhymeless ten-syllable iambic verse as the basis; but this is continually diversified, so as to relieve the ear and keep it awake, by occasional spondees, dibrachs, anapests, and amphibrachs, and by the frequent use of trochees in all parts of the verse, but especially at the beginning, and by a skilful shifting ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Greece, is the middle of the seventh century before the Christian aera (B.C. 660 to B.C. 630), the age of Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, &c. I ground this supposition on the change then operated in the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and music—the elegiac and the iambic measures having been introduced as rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life. Such a change was important at a time when poetry was the only known mode of publication (to use a modern phrase ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer |
