Blank Verse
Blank verse is a form of poetry that consists of unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter. It is a flexible and natural-sounding verse form that has been widely used in English literature, particularly in dramatic works such as Shakespeare's plays. The lack of rhyme allows for greater freedom in expression and lends itself well to the portrayal of natural speech rhythms.
7 Key excerpts on "Blank Verse"
eBook - ePub30-Second Shakespeare
50 Key Aspects of his Works, Life and Legacy, each explained in Half a Minute
- Ros Barber, Mark Rylance(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Ivy Press(Publisher)
...Although commonly confused with free verse, Blank Verse has a regular pattern of rhythm, or meter. It is ‘blank’ because it has no rhyme at the end of the line. The standard meter of Blank Verse is iambic pentameter; a line consisting of five metrical units (called ‘feet’), most of which are ‘iambs’ (a weak-STRONG syllable pattern). Therefore most lines in Shakespeare’s plays have ten syllables. But iambic pentameter is flexible: up to two of the feet can be substituted with other stress patterns (such as an anapest, weak-weak-STRONG, or a trochee, STRONG-weak). When a line has what is called a ‘feminine’ ending, an unstressed syllable may be added to it. Some of Shakespeare’s most famous and powerful lines vary the Blank Verse line: to BE / or NOT / to BE / THAT is / the QUES/tion. Blank Verse comes close to the natural rhythms of English speech, allowing it to sound less mannered than rhymed verse. But a line-length that is one unit longer than common time (4/4) and the tetrameter singsong of nursery rhymes, combined with the relative regularity of alternating stresses, elevates the language. Key speeches and soliloquies are written in Blank Verse, even Caliban’s complaints in The Tempest. 3 - SECOND PROMPT Shakespeare’s plays are written mostly in Blank Verse; iambic pentameter with no rhyme. Blank Verse drama was very new; Shakespeare made it extraordinary. 3 - MINUTE CALL Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was the first person to write English Blank Verse, in his translation of the Aeneid (c.1540). The first play written in Blank Verse was Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. Christopher Marlowe was the first English author to make full use of its potential, and made it an accepted verse form for drama (which had previously been rhyme)...
eBook - ePub- Philip Hobsbaum(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Blank Verse Blank Verse is the most important metre in English. It is the metre in which most of the great poetry has been written. It is unrhymed. It consists of five iambic feet in a line, notated thus: The line usually occupies the time taken by a breath, and therefore is suitable for dramatic performance. It also has the advantage of considerable variety in rhythm, which allows it to represent a range of style quite unequalled by other metres. Blank Verse was first used in English by the Earl of Surrey (?1517–47). It is the metre chosen for his translation of the Aeneid, an epic originally written in Latin by Virgil (70–19 BC). An epic is a large-scale narrative poem on an exalted theme, usually concerned with crisis in a race or culture. Surrey used Blank Verse as an equivalent to the Latin heroic line, the hexameter, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. In the hands of Surrey, Blank Verse is very much a pioneering medium. It is highly conscious of the need to establish a norm, and consequently is more formal in its expression than later attempts at the metre. In other words, the rhythm conforms very closely to its metrical blueprint. The following passage comes from the beginning of Book II in Surrey’s translation: They whisted all, with fixëd face attent, When Prince Æneas from the royal seat Thus gan to speak: O Queen, it is thy will I should renew a woe cannot be told! How that the Greeks did spoil and overthrow The Phrygian wealth and wailful realm of Troy. To write as metrically as this is to risk losing the attention of the reader. There are many more rhythmic possibilities than the extract just cited suggests. The versatility of Blank Verse permits the identification of many varieties within the metre. Three of these may be held to predominate...
eBook - ePubThe Prosody Handbook
A Guide to Poetic Form
- Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...15 Blank Verse Earlier we examined a passage from Surrey’s Blank Verse translation of a book of the Aeneid, and concluded that it was rather wooden. The pioneer work in any form is not likely to be the best. It was not long after Surrey, however, that Blank Verse—in the hands of Marlowe and Shakespeare—reached perfection. The Blank Verse of Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine is already magnificent. Shakespeare made it a still more flexible medium. And so much great, excellent, and better-than-competent Blank Verse has been written since Surrey that it must be regarded as the characteristic form of longer English poems. Blank Verse is undoubtedly the easiest kind of verse to write. One does not have to search for rhymes or move them into the right places, and one does not have to worry about the confines of a stanza. To juxtapose words so that every other syllable receives a stress is not much of a problem. But because it is so easy, and because it is such a spare form, it is one of the hardest to master. The absence of rhyme and stanza form invites prolixity and diffuseness—so easy is it to wander on and on. And Blank Verse has to be handled in a skillful, ever-attentive way to compensate for such qualities as the musical, architectural, and emphatic properties of rhyme; for the sense of direction one feels within a well-turned stanza; and for the rests that come in stanzas. There are no helps. It is like going into a thick woods in unfamiliar acres. THE Blank Verse WRITERS AND THEIR WORKS The following table lists some of the more famous Blank Verse poems and plays...
eBook - ePub- Jeffrey Wainwright(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 ‘Free Verse’ When this Verse was first dictated to me, I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence, like that used by Milton & Shakespeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race. (William Blake, ‘To the Public’, Jerusalem) So much of the theory, and the spirit, that gave rise to the notion of ‘ free verse ’ in the twentieth century can be seen in this address by William Blake (1757–1827) writing at the outset of the nineteenth. This chapter will explore the origins of what came to be known in the twentieth century as ‘free verse’, and look at the many directions this approach to the poetic line have taken. As Blake acknowledges, poets have frequently chafed at the formal demands they inherit, which is why Shakespeare in his plays, and Milton in his epic poetry, ‘derived’ their verse from rhyme and wrote Blank Verse. We have seen too in Chapter 4 how measured verse regularized the numbers of cadences and syllables, but that this regularity was not always strict in practice. But Blake finds their measures ‘monotonous’. He wants ‘variety in every line’ and it is the regulation of beat that becomes the later liberators’ complaint against measured verse...
eBook - ePubThe Languages of Literature
Some Linguistic Contributions to Criticism
- Roger Fowler(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Twelve Three Blank Verse textures As is well known, conventional prosodic analysis is derived from classical quantitative metrics. Although the terms of this form of analysis are inherently unsuitable for a language like English— where ‘stress’ rather than ‘length’ has been chosen as the basic principle of metrical organization—they have become firmly established as a descriptive apparatus for English verse. Generations of literary historians persuaded themselves that iambs and anapaests are applicable to English verse, and doubtless many of our more academic poets came to think in these terms. To conceptualize English verse in the jargon of long syllables, trochees, and the rest demands continuous translation into linguistically more appropriate notions, a controlled use of metaphors which could easily become misleading. Some metrical theorists have, apparently, achieved this translation, and found it possible to describe English verse designs efficiently in the old terms. The limitation on this technique is that it can do little more than establish verse designs —that is to say, identify the general mould in which a particular piece of verse is cast, within the framework of the set of verse designs traditional to the English poetic corpus. It is an extremely blunt instrument as far as the identification of verse instances is concerned, and so can display few of the most important distinctions between particular pieces of verse. The literary critic usually responds to this problem by concentrating on the licences poets take with their verse designs: the assumption is that the individuality of verse passages stems from the distinctive ways in which poets break the rules. Robert Bridges’ classic study of Milton’s prosody, based largely on the study of his use of elision and extra-metrical syllables, draws its value from building on this assumption...
eBook - ePubRhymes and Meters
A Practical Manual for Versifiers
- Horatio Winslow(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...Job, Isaiah, the Psalms and the writings of Solomon are in themselves a treasury of phrase and suggestion. Shakespeare is to be read for the poetry of his lines and picturesque word-grouping if for nothing else. For that matter, the songs of all the Elizabethan dramatists are worthy of study and restudy. They have a lilt and a lightness which make them live even now when so many literary fashions have passed away. The old English ballads, to be found in Percy’s Reliques, Allingham’s Ballad Book and most collections of English Literature, are a help toward understanding the construction of a spirited narrative poem. Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” shows how effectively this sort of treatment can be applied to a modern theme. Robert Herrick is worth while for the grace and delicacy of his poems; with him might be classed the better efforts of Lovelace and Sir John Suckling. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is perhaps the best example we have of continuous Blank Verse. It should be read but not imitated, at least not imitated too much. It is hard to distinguish good Blank Verse from bad and it is so easy to write the bad. Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” deserves a perpetual bookmark for the remarkable success with which the trend of emotion is interpreted by the rhythm. “The Bells,” by Edgar Allan Poe, is another example of this treatment and is held by some critics to be equally good. Pope’s verse and that of his age generally is too cleverly artificial to be of much use to a modern, though his mastery of the epigrammatic couplet might be profitably noted. As an exemplification of finished workmanship Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” stands alone. Robert Burns, for the swing of his songs and the flavor of his words, should be read continually. Much of his Scotch vocabulary might be used, judiciously, in English verse. In the “Eve of St...
eBook - ePub- Kate Aughterson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Introduction Analysing Behn’s Plays This book aims to enable students to approach and understand Behn’s plays without being hindered by a surplus of technical and theoretical terminology. Nevertheless, when we read an old play its literary and social conventions are necessarily alien. It is useful to outline some of the analytical terms used in the analyses in this book. These may be divided into three areas: linguistic form; imagery; and dramatic form and performance. Language Verse, metre, rhythm and rhyme Behn’s plays use a combination of verse and prose. The former is sometimes what is called Blank Verse. Blank Verse is unrhymed and consists of a ten-beat (or ten-syllable) line, in which there are five stressed syllables, and five syllables which are not stressed (de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum). Each ‘de dum’, the combined stressed and unstressed syllable, is called a foot. A ten-beat line with five stresses is called a pentameter (from the Greek, meaning ‘five feet’). Where those stresses fall regularly in an alternating beat, the line is called an iambic pentameter, which is often said to be the ‘natural’ rhythm of the English language. ‘Hello’ stresses the second syllable, and not the first. Where Behn uses Blank Verse it rarely conforms precisely to a regular iambic pentameter, but there are key occasions where it does so, and we draw attention to these in our analysis. Her songs often use an eight-beat line. Behn frequently makes two adjacent lines rhyme. These pairs of lines are referred to as rhyming couplets. This occurs at key points in scenes: for example, at the end, or at the exit of a major character. Behn occasionally uses them to make emphatic points. The couplet often sounds like a summative statement. Behn’s plays, however, are mainly in prose. It is important to note the places where she uses both prose and verse, because these are a good indicator of a change of pace, tone and emotion...
