: Is this couplet in iambic pentameter? Is this couplet in iambic pentameter? Sir thou are in love, take Cupid's wings fly to acquire the source of that feeling.
Is this couplet in iambic pentameter?
Sir thou are in love, take Cupid's wings
fly to acquire the source of that feeling.
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Iambic pentameter means lines made of five ("penta") feet ("meter"), where each foot is an "iamb", meaning two syllables where the second one is stressed. So the rhythm of iambic pentameter is
da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA
Typically, this is intended to follow the natural stress of the words, meaning, the way they are spoken in ordinary conversation. Occasionally you'll find a poem in sprung rhythm, where the stresses are not always in the expected places.
It's not entirely clear where the stresses are in your poem. I think it reads best to me as
Sir THOU are in LOVE take CUP-id's WINGS
FLY to acQUIre the SOURCE of that FEELing
This would be iambic quadrimeter (four feet) with some doubling on the unstressed beat, and the initial unstressed syllable omitted at the beginning of the second verse, neither of which are uncommon variations. If that is your intended reading, you may want to mark the stresses, since there are other, equally plausible readings. Alternately, you could drop the "Sir," I think that makes it easier to read it in the right rhythm, and gives both lines the same pattern.
Close, but not quite.
A line in iambic pentameter is made up of five iambic feet. An iambic foot is made up of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (for example, the word "a-bove"). For this answer, I will be using bold to indicate stressed syllables.
Your first line fits the meter, but only has nine syllables, and is missing an unstressed syllable at the beginning:
Sir thou are in love, take Cupid's wings
Your second line has ten syllables, but the first and last feet are inverted, with the stressed syllable coming first:
Fly to acquire the source of that feeling
That's not to say you can't do this: Wikipedia lists several examples of rhythmic variations, from Shakespeare and others.
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