Laurel · Poems by form and metre

Fourteeners

Lines of seven iambs, fourteen syllables, the measure of the Elizabethan translators of Homer and Ovid. Below, what the metre is and how to recognise it, then every poem on Laurel measured as fourteeners, with how closely each keeps it.

What fourteeners is

Lines of seven beats, light then heavy, fourteen syllables. The measure of the Elizabethan translators of Homer and Ovid; read aloud it breaks after the fourth beat into a ballad’s four-and-three.

da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

a-CHIL-les’ BANE-ful WRATH re-SOUND, o GOD-dess, THAT im-POSED
Chapman, The Iliad; the beats in capitals

How to tell

Fourteen syllables, seven beats, usually rhymed in pairs.

Paste a poem of your own and Laurel will say whether it is in fourteeners, stanza by stanza. How to scan a line.

9 poems on Laurel in fourteeners

  1. Carmen XXX: To Alfenus the Perjuror Catullus, The Carmina · 95%
  2. A Good Boy Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses · 97%
  3. Absence Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows · 84%
  4. A Prayer Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows · 79%
  5. To R. F. B W. E. Henley, Poems · 91%
  6. Book I: Elegy the Ninth: To Pholoe and Marathus Tibullus, The Elegies · 94%
  7. The Banishment of the Cid XIX Anonymous, The Lay of the Cid · 92%
  8. Book II: Elegy the Sixth: Let Lovers All Enlist Tibullus, The Elegies · 92%
  9. A Dream of Spring Various, A Lute of Jade · 88%

Each poem's metre was measured from its own words by the method described here; the figure beside a poem is the share of its stressed syllables that fall on the beat. Forms are named from the rhyme scheme and line count together.