Petrarch's sonnets, also with exclusively female rhymes. The latter is fixed in Italian on the female rhyme and is adapted in German in pronouncedly Italianizing poetry or re-poetry of Italian originals, e.g. I'm so staggering, I don't feel like doing anything.įreedom in the handling of the caesura, on the other hand, characterizes iambic pentameter, which follows the model of the Italian Endecasillabo. Example (Johann Christian Günther, Abschiedsaria):įor what you weep is blood from my heart. divided by caesura, and provided at the end of the verse with alternating masculine (stressed on the last syllable) and feminine (stressed on the penultimate syllable) rhymes, it follows the model of the French vers commun, which, still without regularly alternating rhyme, was already widespread in French poetry of the Middle Ages, then in the French Renaissance, there gradually with regularly alternating rhyme, as a verse measure subordinate to the Alexandrian was further used and after the model of the French Renaissance then also by the German poetry and poetics of the Baroque adapted and there also the Alexandrian was subordinated. If the iambic pentameter is regularly or predominantly broken after the second heightening, i. Since the second half of the 18th century, in the course of the rediscovery of William Shakespeare and medieval or perceived medieval Roman models, especially Dante's and Petrarch's, the iambic pentameter has become one of the most widely used German verse types, practically unrivalled as stage verse, and has thus displaced the Alexandrian, which was still the dominant verse metre in German Baroque, following the example of French Renaissance and Classical poetry. In German, it occurs unrhymed as blank verse, primarily in stage poetry, and more rarely as rhymed verse. It is a very common meter in literatures with accentuating verse principles. The iambic pentameter (also rising pentameter) is a verse meter consisting of five iambs.

Is iambic pentameter a sonnet