Note to As You Like It, 3.2.165-166: "some of them had in them more feet / than the verses would bear"


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As You Like It,
Act 3, Scene 2, lines 165-166.
some of them had in them more feet than the verses would bear: some had more feet in them than their verse-form could carry. Rosalind is simultaneously making fun of both the poetry and the terminology used in parsing [to examine syntactically] poetry.

Different kinds of feet cause the underlying sound of poetry because feet are various combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables: an iambic foot, for instance, contains one stressed and one unstressed syllable in each foot.

The da-DUM of a human heartbeat is the most common example of this [iambic] rhythm. A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:
da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM



Straightforward examples of this rhythm can be heard in the opening line of
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time
da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM