Blank Verse

Blank verse and free verse are not the same. Free verse is much freer, but blank verse is almost always free of end-of-line rhymes. Try putting your free verse poem into meter.

Blank verse usually has ten syllables per line with every other syllable stressed, known as iambic pentameter, the most common meter in English verse. The ten syllables are accented on every second beat. There are five iambs, a metric foot of two syllables with the stress on the second syllable. These lines in iambic pentameter are the opening lines of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”  by William Wordsworth. (This has been one of my favorite poems since high school.)

             Five years have past; five summers, with the length

            Of five long winters! and again I hear

            These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

            With a sweet inland murmur.— Once again

            Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

            Which on a wild secluded scene impress

            Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

            The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

 From Handbook of Poetic Forms: A good way to begin writing blank verse is to practice writing a ten-syllable line. At first, many of your lines won’t have five stresses – five syllables that are strongly accented. Don’t worry about that at the start.

The iambic pentameter line is the length of a human breath. I haven’t measured it, but that’s what I’ve been told. Try taking a breath, reading a line, and then taking another breath.

 Here is a more recent example of blank verse – Robert Frost’s Mending Wall.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

    The work of hunters is another thing:

    I have come after them and made repair

    Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

    But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

    To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

    No one has seen them made or heard them made,

    But at spring mending-time we find them there.

    I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

    And on a day we meet to walk the line

    And set the wall between us once again.

    We keep the wall between us as we go.

    To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

    And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

    We have to use a spell to make them balance:

    ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

    We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

    Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

    One on a side. It comes to little more:

    There where it is we do not need the wall:

    He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

    My apple trees will never get across

    And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

    He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

    Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

    If I could put a notion in his head:

    ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

    Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

    Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

    What I was walling in or walling out,

    And to whom I was like to give offense.

    Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

    That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

    But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

    He said it for himself. I see him there

    Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

    In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

    He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

    Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

    He will not go behind his father's saying,

    And he likes having thought of it so well

    He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Hint: Don’t try this with Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. That’s iambic tetrameter. Only four feet, eight syllables per line.

   Whose woods these are I think I know . . .