- Fourteener (poetry)
A Fourteener, in
poetry , is a line consisting of 14 syllables, usually having 7iamb ic feet, often used in16th century English verse. Sometimes it also used to mean a poem of 14 lines, frequently asonnet .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?Sidney's friend, the translator
Arthur Golding , was extremely fond of fourteeners::Now have I brought a work to end which neither Jove's fierce wrath,:Nor sword, nor fire, nor fretting age with all the force it hath:Are able to abolish quite. Let come that fatal hour:Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over me no power,:And at his pleasure make an end of mine uncertain time.:Yet shall the better part of me assured be to climb:Aloft above the starry sky. And all the world shall never:Be able for to quench my name. For look how far so ever:The Roman empire by the right of conquest shall extend,:So far shall all folk read this work. And time without all end:(If poets as by prophecy about the truth may aim):My life shall everlastingly be lengthened still by fame. (Ovid , "Metamorphoses " 15.984-95, tr. Golding)Poulter's measure is a meter consisting of alternate
Alexandrine s and Fourteeners, i.e. 12 and 14 syllable lines. It was often used in theElizabethan era . The term was coined byGeorge Gascoigne , because poulters, or poulterers (sellers ofpoultry ), would sometimes give 12 to the dozen, and other times 14 (see alsoBaker's dozen ).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 toThomas 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.ee also
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Heptameter
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