What We Didn’t Learn in High School English

Remember learning about poetry in high school? Perhaps you were lucky and had a teacher who actually knew something about it. Mine, dedicated teachers that they were, thought teaching poetry meant drilling students on rhyme schemes and meter. Is this poem a sonnet or a villanelle? Is it AA BB CCD? Or ABC ABD? Or ABAWHOGIVESA . . .? Meanwhile, a world of force and mystery, magic and spirit was just behind the classroom door, if only someone had thought to open it.

Take, for example, iambic pentameter. We all learned about it in English class. What we didn’t learn is the part that matters.

What we learned in high school:

Iambic pentameter is a type of meter used in poetry, consisting of five units, or “feet,” each comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? (From Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.)

What we didn’t learn in high school:

Iambic pentameter is the beating of the shaman’s drum transformed into words. It is this hypnotic rhythm that moves the dancer into trance, that sends the listener into realms of dream and ecstacy, that draws the spirit world nearer.

What we learned in high school:

Iambic pentameter was what Shakespeare used when he wrote in verse:

This was the most unkindest cut of all.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
If music be the food of love, play on.

What we didn’t learn in high school:

Iambic pentameter mimics the beating of the human heart. It brings us back to the womb, when all we heard was the sustaining rhythm of our mothers’ hearts.

What we learned in high school:

Sometimes Shakespeare and other poets varied iambic pentameter, such as by adding a syllable at the end or by including in which the first syllable carried the stress:

To be or not to be: That is the question.

Now is the winter of our discontent.
What we didn’t learn in high school:

When you hear poetry written in iambic pentameter, you are tapping into something powerful, mystical, mysterious, and ancient. When you hear that rhythm, forget those long, dull days of high school English, tap into that primeval beat. Give yourself up to it.