

This makes it the opposite of the iamb, which, as you'll recall, has one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (da-DUM). The trochee: a metrical foot in which the first syllable is stressed, and the second is unstressed, like " night-ly." It makes the sound DUM-da.These variations from the iambic foot include: This is all right, though (well within the formal rules). All the lines are ten syllables, but the iambic pattern bends a bit sometimes. Got that? Though it's written in regular iambic pentameter, there are a few variations. Here's an example of what it looks like in "Blackberry-Picking," with the stressed syllables in bold and italics: At first, | just one, | a gloss|y pur|ple clot. It sounds like this: ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM. Iambic pentameter is a really common meter in English-language poetry.

This means each line has five ("penta") metrical feet (two syllables to a foot, so ten syllables in all), which are iambic (one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). It's written in a regular, measured pattern called iambic pentameter. The poem is two uneven stanzas, one that consists of sixteen lines and one of eight lines.
