Fourteener (poetry)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Fourteener, in poetry, is a line consisting of 14 syllables, usually having 7 iambic feet, often used in 16th century English verse. Sometimes it also used to mean a poem of 14 lines, frequently a sonnet.
Poulter's measure is a meter consisting of alternate Alexandrines and Fourteeners, i.e. 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).
The seventh song of Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella 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?
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 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.
William Blake used lines of fourteen syllables, for example in The Book of Thel.
The iambic heptameter is closely related to the common meter, which breaks the seven-foot line into alternating lines of 4 and 3 feet.
