Blank verse

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POETIC FORMS & GENRES Blank Verse Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

Transcript of Blank verse

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POETIC FORMS & GENRES

Blank Verse

Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

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BLANK VERSE The unrhymed five beat iambic line,

otherwise known as iambic pentameter Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise

Lost, Wordsworth’s long poem ‘The Prelude’, are written in blank verse.

Chaucer (c1342-1400) wrote in iambic pentameter BUT not blank verse. His poetry rhymed:

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FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES(CHAUCER, LATE 14TH C)Whan that aprill with his shoures sooteThe droghte of march hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veyne in swich licourOf which vertu engendred is the flour;Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breethInspired hath in every holt and heethTendre croppes, and the yonge sonneHath in the ram his halve cours yronne,And smale foweles maken melodye,That slepen al the nyght with open ye(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

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HISTORY OF BLANK VERSE

Like the sonnet, blank verse came to English poetry from Italy: verse sciolati da rima (‘verse freed from rhyme’)

1540: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey translated ‘The Aenied’ into English using this ‘straunge meter’

In the Renaissance there was intense interest in finding an unrhymed line which would be as powerful as the Classical Greek or Latin epic

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USES OF BLANK VERSE• Particularly, but not exclusively, suited to

long works• Continuity, enjambment, relatively

natural word order. Verse Drama.• Also suited more unusual word order

(‘syntactic inversion’). Epic poetry.• Milton: argued against ‘the troublesome

and modern bondage of rhyming’, rhyme is a ‘constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest them’

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STRESS: A LITTLE REVISION• An iamb is an unstressed syllable

followed by a stressed one. ‘I am’, ‘Alert’, ‘Revolv/ing Door’

• Pentameter means that there are five of these in a line.

x/x/x/x/x/(di DUM di DUM di DUM di DUM di DUM)• Often there are slight variations

involving substituting an iamb with one of the other three main types of ‘feet’:

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VARIATIONS – THREE OTHER TYPES OF ‘FOOT’

Trochee /X (DUM di) laughter, never Anapest XX/ (di di DUM) Tennesee Dactyl (particularly the first two) /XX

(DUM di di)suddenly

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VARIATIONS – THREE COMMON VARIATIONS IN THE IAMBIC PENTAMETER LINE A reversed foot. Instead of an iamb, you

have a trochee. Often at the beginning of the line:

‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’.

An extra unstressed syllable at the end: ‘Which, he once heard, was proper to

grow wise in’ Replacing an iamb with a three syllable

foot: ‘The fair Ophelia! Nymph in thy

orisons’Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

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JOHN HOLLANDER SAYS...Iambic five-beat lines are labelled blank Verse (with sometimes a foot or two

reversed,Or one more syllable –“feminine

ending”). Blank verse can be extremely flexible: It ticks and tocks the time with even

feet (Or sometimes, cleverly, can end

limping).

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FROM SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO

O, that the slave had forty thousand lives!One is too poor, too weak for my revenge.Now do I see 'tis true. Look here, Iago;All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven.'Tis gone.Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throneTo tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught,For 'tis of aspics' tongues!

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FROM KING JOHN: My lord?  A grave.  He shall not live.  Enough.

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MILTON: PARADISE LOST (1667)

• Very skilful use of blank verse including suspended syntax, extensive enjambment, and internal rhyming echoes

...The force of those dire Arms? yet not for those

Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage Can else inflict do I repent or change, Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit, That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend, And to the fierce contention brought along Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring, His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n, And shook his throne. (from Bk 1) Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

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ENJAMBMENT AND ‘DOUBLE SYNTAX’CAN BE USED EFFECTIVELY IN BLANK VERSE

I formed them free, and free they must remain,Till they enthral themselves: I else must changeTheir nature, and revoke the high decreeUnchangeable, eternal, which ordainedTheir freedom, they themselves ordained their fall.(PL, Bk 3)

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ROMANTIC PERIOD• Blank verse used for longer meditative verse. E.g.

Wordsworth’s Prelude, Coleridge’s ‘conversation poems’ e.g. From ‘The Aeolian Harp’ (1796):

Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,And many idle flitting phantasies,Traverse my indolent and passive brain,As wild and various, as the random galesThat swell and flutter on this subject Lute !And what if all of animated natureBe but organic Harps diversly fram'd,That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweepsPlastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,At once the Soul of each, and God of all ?Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

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20TH C• From Robert Frost ‘Mending Wall’ (1914)

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 repairWhere 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 lineAnd set the wall between us once again.We keep the wall between us as we go.

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FROM THE PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY & POETICS:

• ‘the advent of free verse sounded the death-knell of this meter which was once and for long a powerful, flexible, and subtle form, the most prestigious and successful modern rival to the greatest meter of antiquity’. A little too solemn?

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RHYTHM AND RAP• In rap and performance poetry there is a

resurgence of the importance of regular rhythm, with appropriate variations.

• rap tends to use a four-beat line which is associated with oral poetry and performance, whereas the five beat, pentameter line, has traditionally been associated with more text-based poetry.

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