<P> but wrote "vanishingly few" lines of the form of "As gazelles leap a never - resting brook". The stress patterns are the same, and in particular, the normally weak third syllable is stressed in both lines; the difference is that in Shakespeare's line the stressed third syllable is a one - syllable word, "four", whereas in the un-Shakespearean line it is part of a two - syllable word, "gazelles". (The definitions and exceptions are more technical than stated here .) Pope followed such a rule strictly, Shakespeare fairly strictly, Milton much less, and Donne not at all--which may be why Ben Jonson said Donne deserved hanging for "not keeping of accent". </P> <P> Derek Attridge has pointed out the limits of the generative approach; it has "not brought us any closer to understanding why particular metrical forms are common in English, why certain variations interrupt the metre and others do not, or why metre functions so powerfully as a literary device ." Generative metrists also fail to recognize that a normally weak syllable in a strong position will be pronounced differently, i.e. "promoted" and so no longer "weak ." </P> <P> Latin verse included lines of ten syllables . It is widely thought that some line of this length, perhaps in the Alcmanian meter, led to the ten - syllable line of some Old French chansons de geste such as The Song of Roland . Those Old French lines invariably had a caesura after the fourth syllable . This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born . In both Old French and Old Provençal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables . Italian poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante adopted this line, generally using the eleven - syllable form (endecasillabo) because most Italian words have feminine endings . They often used a pattern where the fourth syllable (normally accented) and the fifth (normally unaccented) were part of the same word, the opposite of the Old French line with its required pause after the fourth syllable . This pattern came to be considered typically Italian . </P> <P> Geoffrey Chaucer followed the Italian poets in his ten - syllable lines, placing his pauses freely and often using the "Italian" pattern, but he deviated from it by introducing a strong iambic rhythm and the variations described above . This was an iambic pentameter . Chaucer's friend John Gower used a similar meter in his poem "In Praise of Peace ." </P>

The most common meter in english poetry is iambic pentameter