How often did Shakespeare neglect iambic pentameter in sonnets?

Answer 1

I suppose it is because some poets chose to change things up a little. For Shakespeare, some think that he changed the way he wrote certain parts of his plays based on a character's motivations... for instance, if a character was rebellious, then the "formal" structure might be changed out a little. In general, the answer is poetic license. Poets change the way they do things in order to improve the poems... that is, unless it was a mistake. For some poets, it might be.

Answer 2

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets in total, and the majority of them follow iambic pentameter. However, there are instances where he deviates from it to emphasize certain words or ideas. These variations are used for dramatic effect and do not occur frequently in his sonnets.

Answer 3

Iambic pentameter is the system of using alternating stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. Think of this song as a poem:

Mary had a little lamb

Its fleece was white as snow

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go

That verse starts with stressed syllable and alternates every other syllable until the end which gives it a sing-song effect. See the link below.

Answer 4

All of Shakespeare's sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, but sometimes he changes the rhythm slightly in a line. For example, "Let me not to the marriage of two minds", the first line of the famous Sonnet 116, has ten syllables all right, but if you try to say it all iambic it sounds peculiar, like "Let ME not TO the MARR-iage OF true MINDS." We want to say it "LET me NOT to the MARR-iage of TRUE MINDS." The line is irregular, as the iambic rhythm does not really fit the words. In some cases, like the first line of Sonnet 60, "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore", there are eleven syllables in the line, one too many, which we would have to correct by pronouncing "towards" as "t'wards". The same happens in line 10 of Sonnet 99 where "robbery" must be pronounced "robb'ry". In Sonnet 87, all fourteen lines have eleven syllables! But in this case the extra syllable is an unaccented syllable at the end of every line, forming what are called "feminine rhymes". This is considered an acceptable variation on iambic pentameter. In short, Shakespeare doesn't "neglect" iambic pentameter, but he does play with it and alter it on specific occasions when he feels it is needed.