In
poetry
Poetry (from the Greek language, Greek word ''poiesis'', "making") is a form of literature, literary art that uses aesthetics, aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meaning (linguistics), meanings in addition to, or in ...
, a fourteener is a line consisting of 14 syllables, which are usually made of seven
iambic feet, for which the style is also called iambic
heptameter. It is most commonly found in
English poetry produced in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fourteeners often appear as rhymed couplets, in which case they may be seen as
ballad stanza or
common metre hymn quatrains in two rather than four lines.
Background
Poulter's measure is a meter consisting of alternate
Alexandrines combined with Fourteeners, to form a poem of 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). When the poulter's measure couplet is divided at its
caesurae, it becomes a short measure stanza, a
quatrain of 3, 3, 4, and 3 feet. Examples of this form are
Nicholas Grimald's ''A Truelove'';
Lord Brooke's ''Epitaph on Sir Phillip Sydney'';
Nicholas Breton's ''Phyllis'' in the Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse.
In the early 17th century,
George Chapman
George Chapman ( – 12 May 1634) was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He is ...
famously used the fourteener when he produced one of the first
English translations of Homer's ''
Iliad
The ''Iliad'' (; , ; ) is one of two major Ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Odyssey'', the poem is divided into 24 books and ...
''. Two centuries later, in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,"
John Keats expressed his appreciation for what he called the "loud and bold" quality of Chapman's translation, which he implicitly contrasted with the more prestigious but more tightly controlled
heroic couplets of
Alexander Pope's 18th-century translation, thereby using one type of fourteener (a sonnet) to comment on the other (iambic heptameter).
Samuel Johnson in his ''
Lives of The English Poets'' comments upon the importance of fourteeners to later English lyric forms saying, "as these lines had their
caesura always at the eighth syllable, it was thought in time commodious to divide them; and quatrains of lines alternately consisting of eight and six syllables make the most soft and pleasing of our lyric measures". These quatrains of eight and six syllables (or more loosely, lines of 4, 3, 4, and 3 beats) are known as
common meter.
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.
The poets Surrey, Tuberville, Gascoigne, Balassone, Golding and others all used the Poulter's Measure, the rhyming fourteener with authority.
[Schmidt, Michael, ''Lives of the Poets'' Weidenfeld & Nicolson, The Orion Publishing Group, 1998]
References
{{Poetic meters
Poetic rhythm