"Iambic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "after that there is no more to be said. Was it for this that, at the age of four, I was borne by two reluctant goats along the Hastings strand? Pardon me, those last six words comprise an iambic line—a fact which is itself the best evidence of my agitation. It is a little winning way I have. Most criminals when charged make no reply. When I am arrested, I shall protest in anapaests. As I was saying, was ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... of two years had been phantasmagorically compressed into a few moments; and the glow departed from the maiden's thoughts and words, and her soul found itself at the narrow window of the present, from which she could behold but a dreary country.—From the street came the iambic cry of the fool, ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... welcome third at 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
... Roman, achieved brilliant results. It is enough to name Archilochus, whom Mahaffy terms the Swift of Greek Literature, Simonides of Amorgos (circ. 660 B.C.), the author of the famous Satire on Women, and Hipponax of Ephesus, reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic. ...
— English Satires • Various
... magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... takes such great liberties with great Poets, himself pretending to be little more than a Versifier. I know not how it is with you who are really a Poet; and perhaps you may think I am as wrong about my trochee as about my iambic. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... than our losses, are the objects of my surprise. Many curious and interesting facts are buried in oblivion: the three great historians of Rome have been transmitted to our hands in a mutilated state, and we are deprived of many pleasing compositions of the lyric, iambic, and dramatic poetry of the Greeks. Yet we should gratefully remember, that the mischances of time and accident have spared the classic works to which the suffrage of antiquity [123] had adjudged the first place of genius and glory: the teachers of ancient knowledge, who ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... vehicle for a long narrative poem. Suggestions for its construction were taken from three Italian metres—the Ottava Rima, the Terza Rima, the Sonnet—and the Ballade stanza. There are eight lines in the iambic pentameter measure ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... in distressing the ear and so obscuring the sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them. A dirge may be in racing anapaests, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work, indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to the ear with delightful ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... 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, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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, a corpulent man with strongly-marked features and a sensual ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... follow it, he has mingled one or two others that had been used by our elder poets, but almost entirely rejected by the refiners of the couplet measure till the time of Langhorne; as where the substantive and its epithet are so placed, that the latter makes the end of an iambic in the second, and the former the beginning of a trochee ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the soloist exclaimed. "There are two kinds of poetic feet—the Iambic and the Trochaic. You have one of each. In poetic feet the heels are often found in French forms. But poets are a footloose class and are often found with lame and halting feet. You don't seem to ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... his mind, and by using every exertion got the maid. Cato, who was greatly irritated and stung, made preparation to prosecute the matter in legal form, but on his friends preventing him, in his passion and youthful fervour he betook himself to iambic verses and vented much injurious language upon Scipio, employing the bitterness of Archilochus,[667] but dropping his ungoverned licence and childish manner. He married Atilia,[668] the daughter of Soranus, and this was the first woman with whom ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... all badly'. It is unfortunately impossible to trace the plan of the poem, which presumably detailed the adventures of this unheroic character: the metre used was a curious mixture of hexametric and iambic lines. The date of such a work cannot be high: Croiset thinks it may belong to the period of Archilochus (c. 650 B.C.), but it may ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... grave tragedians taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for example, might be reduced to a rich and yet regular metre. But then the regulae must be first known; though I will venture to say, that he who does not find a line (not corrupted) of Massinger's flow to the time total of a trimeter catalectic iambic verse, has not read it aright. But by virtue of the last principle—the retardation of acceleration of time—we have the proceleusmatic foot u u u u, and the dispondaeus - - - -, not to mention the choriambus, the ionics, paeons, and epitrites. Since Dryden, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... was placed on the right side the following iambic verse was curiously engraven in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... afterwards, while Candaules was sleeping, Gyges came privily up to him 10 and slew him, and he obtained both his wife and his kingdom: of him moreover Archilochos the Parian, who lived about that time, made mention in a trimeter iambic verse. 11 ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus |
