Fourteener (poetry)
Encyclopedia
A Fourteener, in poetry
, is a line consisting of 14 syllables, usually having 7 iambic heptametric
feet, most commonly found in English poetry
produced in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fourteeners often appear as rhymed couplets, in which case they may be seen as ballad stanza
or common metre
hymn
quatrain
s in two rather than four lines.
The term may also be used as a synonym for quatorzain
, a 14-line poem, such as a sonnet
.
s combined with Fourteeners, to form a poem of 12 and 14 syllable lines. It was often used in the Elizabethan era
. The term was coined by George Gascoigne
, because poulters, or poulterers (sellers of poultry
), would sometimes give 12 to the dozen, and other times 14 (see also Baker's dozen). When the poulter's measure couplet is divided at its caesurae, it becomes a short measure stanza, a quatrain of 3, 3, 4, and 3 feet.
In the early 17th century, George Chapman
famously used the fourteener when he produced one of the first English translations of Homer
's Iliad
. Two centuries later, in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," John Keats
expressed his appreciation for what he called the "loud and bold" quality of Chapman's translation, which he implicitly contrasted with the more prestigious but more tightly controlled heroic couplet
s of Alexander Pope
's 18th-century translation, thereby using one type of fourteener (a sonnet) to comment on the other (iambic heptameter).
Samuel Johnson
in his Lives of The English Poets comments upon the importance of fourteeners to later English lyric forms saying "as these lines had their caesura
always at the eighth syllable, it was thought in time commodious to divide them; and quatrains of lines alternately consisting of eight and six syllables make the most soft and pleasing of our lyric measures". These quatrains of eight and six syllables (or more loosely, lines of 4, 3, 4, and 3 beats) are known as common meter.
C. S. Lewis
, in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, castigates the 'lumbering' poulter's measure (p. 109). He attributes the introduction of this 'terrible' meter to Thomas Wyatt
(p. 224). In a more extended analysis (pp. 231–2), he comments:
The poets Surrey, Tuberville, Gascoigne, Golding and others all used the Poulter's Measure, the rhyming fourteener with authority.
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, is a line consisting of 14 syllables, usually having 7 iambic heptametric
Heptameter
Heptameter is one or more lines of verse containing seven metrical feet .An example from Lord Byron's Youth and Age:...
feet, most commonly found in English poetry
English poetry
The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have written some of the most enduring poems in Western culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe. Consequently, the term English poetry is...
produced in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fourteeners often appear as rhymed couplets, in which case they may be seen as ballad stanza
Ballad Stanza
In poetry, a Ballad stanza is the four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folk ballad. This form consists of alternating four- and three-stress lines. Usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme . Assonance in place of rhyme is common...
or common metre
Common metre
Common metre or Common measure, abbreviated C. M., is a poetic meter consisting of four lines which alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter Common metre or Common measure, abbreviated C. M., is a poetic meter consisting of four lines which alternate between iambic tetrameter (four...
hymn
Hymn
A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
quatrain
Quatrain
A quatrain is a stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines of verse. Existing in various forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China; and, continues into the 21st century, where it is...
s in two rather than four lines.
The term may also be used as a synonym for quatorzain
Quatorzain
A quatorzain is a poem of fourteen lines. Historically the term has often been used interchangeably with the term 'sonnet'. Various writers have tried to draw distinctions between 'true' sonnets, and quatorzains...
, a 14-line poem, such as a sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
.
Background
Poulter's measure is a meter consisting of alternate AlexandrineAlexandrine
An alexandrine is a line of poetic meter comprising 12 syllables. Alexandrines are common in the German literature of the Baroque period and in French poetry of the early modern and modern periods. Drama in English often used alexandrines before Marlowe and Shakespeare, by whom it was supplanted...
s combined with Fourteeners, to form a poem of 12 and 14 syllable lines. It was often used in the Elizabethan era
Elizabethan era
The Elizabethan era was the epoch in English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign . Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history...
. The term was coined by George Gascoigne
George Gascoigne
George Gascoigne was an English poet, soldier, artist, and unsuccessful courtier. He is considered the most important poet of the early Elizabethan era, following Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and leading to the emergence of Philip Sidney...
, because poulters, or poulterers (sellers of poultry
Poultry
Poultry are domesticated birds kept by humans for the purpose of producing eggs, meat, and/or feathers. These most typically are members of the superorder Galloanserae , especially the order Galliformes and the family Anatidae , commonly known as "waterfowl"...
), would sometimes give 12 to the dozen, and other times 14 (see also Baker's dozen). When the poulter's measure couplet is divided at its caesurae, it becomes a short measure stanza, a quatrain of 3, 3, 4, and 3 feet.
In the early 17th century, George Chapman
George Chapman
George Chapman was an English dramatist, translator, and poet. He was a classical scholar, and his work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been identified as the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Minto, and as an anticipator of the Metaphysical Poets...
famously used the fourteener when he produced one of the first English translations of Homer
English translations of Homer
This is a list of English translations of Homer—that is, of the Iliad and Odyssey—chronologically ordered by date of first publication, with first lines often provided to illustrate the style of the translation. This is a list of English translations of Homer—that is, of the Iliad and...
's Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
. Two centuries later, in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
expressed his appreciation for what he called the "loud and bold" quality of Chapman's translation, which he implicitly contrasted with the more prestigious but more tightly controlled heroic couplet
Heroic couplet
A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The rhyme is always masculine. Use of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in...
s of Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
's 18th-century translation, thereby using one type of fourteener (a sonnet) to comment on the other (iambic heptameter).
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
in his Lives of The English Poets comments upon the importance of fourteeners to later English lyric forms saying "as these lines had their caesura
Caesura
thumb|100px|An example of a caesura in modern western music notation.In meter, a caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. The plural form of caesura is caesuras or caesurae...
always at the eighth syllable, it was thought in time commodious to divide them; and quatrains of lines alternately consisting of eight and six syllables make the most soft and pleasing of our lyric measures". These quatrains of eight and six syllables (or more loosely, lines of 4, 3, 4, and 3 beats) are known as common meter.
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
, in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, castigates the 'lumbering' poulter's measure (p. 109). He attributes the introduction of this 'terrible' meter to Thomas Wyatt
Thomas Wyatt
Thomas Wyatt may refer to:* Thomas Wyatt , English poet* Thomas Wyatt the younger , rebel leader* Thomas Henry Wyatt , British architect...
(p. 224). In a more extended analysis (pp. 231–2), he comments:
The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do well enough in French, becomes intolerable in a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally different one: the line dances a jig.
The poets Surrey, Tuberville, Gascoigne, Golding and others all used the Poulter's Measure, the rhyming fourteener with authority.
Illustrations
- William BlakeWilliam BlakeWilliam Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
used lines of fourteen syllables, for example in The Book of ThelThe Book of ThelThe Book of Thel is a poem by William Blake, dated 1789 and probably worked on in the period 1788 to 1790.It is illustrated by his own plates, and is relatively short and easy to understand, compared to his later prophetic books. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line. It was preceded by Tiriel,...
. These lines, however, are not written in iambic heptameter.
- Emily DickinsonEmily DickinsonEmily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
frequently used iambic heptameter reworked as ballad stanzas, for example:
- Because I could not stop for Death,
- He kindly stopped for me;
- The carriage held but just ourselves
- And Immortality.
- J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a poem titled "Galadriel's Song of Eldamar" using only fourteeners. Many of Tolkien's other songs also use heptameter.
- The Gravemind from the Halo Trilogy speaks in fourteeners.
- The seventh song of Philip SidneyPhilip SidneySir Philip Sidney was an English poet, courtier and soldier, and is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan Age...
's Astrophel and StellaAstrophel and StellaLikely composed in the 1580s, Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella is an English sonnet sequence containing 108 sonnets and 11 songs. The name derives from the two Greek words, 'aster' and 'phil' , and the Latin word 'stella' meaning star. Thus Astrophel is the star lover, and Stella is his star...
is written in rhyming fourteener couplets:
- Who have so leaden eyes, as not to see sweet beauty's show,
- Or seeing, have so wooden wits, as not that worth to know?
- Sidney's friend, the translator Arthur GoldingArthur GoldingArthur Golding was an English translator of more than 30 works from Latin into English. While primarily remembered today for his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses because of its influence on Shakespeare's works, in his own time he was most famous for his translation of Caesar's Commentaries, and...
, was extremely fond of fourteeners:
- Now have I brought a work to end which neither Jove's fierce wrath,
- Nor sword, nor fire, nor fretting age with all the force it hath
- Are able to abolish quite. Let come that fatal hour
- Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over me no power,
- And at his pleasure make an end of mine uncertain time.
- Yet shall the better part of me assured be to climb
- Aloft above the starry sky. And all the world shall never
- Be able for to quench my name. For look how far so ever
- The Roman empire by the right of conquest shall extend,
- So far shall all folk read this work. And time without all end
- My life shall everlastingly be lengthened still by fame. (OvidOvidPublius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
, Metamorphoses 15.984-95, tr. Golding)
- The theme to Gilligan's IslandGilligan's IslandGilligan's Island is an American television series created and produced by Sherwood Schwartz and originally produced by United Artists Television. The situation comedy series featured Bob Denver; Alan Hale, Jr.; Jim Backus; Natalie Schafer; Tina Louise; Russell Johnson; and Dawn Wells. It aired for...
is largely composed in iambic heptameter:
- Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip
- That started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship.
Poulter's measure
- Henry Howard, Earl of SurreyHenry Howard, Earl of SurreyHenry Howard, KG, , known as The Earl of Surrey although he never was a peer, was an English aristocrat, and one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry.-Life:...
's "Complaint of the Absence of her lover, being upon the sea" (1547) is in Poulter's measure:
- Good ladies, ye that have your pleasure in exile
- Step in your foot, come take a place, and mourn with me awhile,
- And such as by their lord do set but little price
- Let them sit still, it skills them not what chance come on the dice.
External links
- Examples of Poulter's Measure of Thomas Wyatt and others http://wyatt-poultersmeasure.blogspot.com/