“Blank verse” is a literary term that refers to poetry written in unrhymed but metered
lines, almost always iambic pentameter.
“Iambic pentameter” refers to the meter of the poetic line: a line of poetry written
this way is composed of five “iambs”: groups of two syllables that fall into an
“unstressed-stressed” pattern: famously, like a heartbeat: buh-BUM, buh-BUM.
Traditionally – say, in a Shakespeare sonnet – lines of iambic pentameter are then combined
with end-rhymes to create various rhyming patterns.
You can hear this very clearly in the famous opening quatrain -- the first four lines -- of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May; And summer’s lease hath all too short a
date” Here, the 1st and 3rd lines rhyme at the end,
and so do the 2nd and 4th.
But in blank verse, there are no end-rhymes: lines of metered verse – usually iambic
pentameter -- simply follow one after another without being connected by rhyming words.
Blank verse is not a recent invention: Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, among others, popularized
the use of blank verse in their plays.
But the most famous early example of a poem composed in blank verse is without a doubt
John Milton’s epic masterpiece, Paradise Lost, which appeared in its twelve-book form
in 1674.
In a prefatory note to the poem, Milton explains that he has chosen to write Paradise Lost
in what he calls “English heroic verse without rhyme” – that is, in unrhymed iambic pentameter.
And Milton says that he’s done so because Homer and Virgil wrote their epics in unrhymed
Greek and Latin, respectively.
So Milton is very much setting himself up as their successor
Rhyme, he goes on, was “the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter
and lame meter.”
Some of Milton’s contemporaries use it pretty well, he admits, but he still finds that they
do so because they are “carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance
and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they
would have expressed them.”
In other words, there will be no childish or vulgar rhymes for Milton in Paradise Lost,
since that would be beneath his epic ambition and would constrain his ability to tell the
story he wants to tell.
The very fact that Milton felt the need to defend his decision suggests, of course, that
readers of his day would have expected to read rhyming verse.
Milton, instead, ends his prefatory note by telling readers that they should be thankful
he has “recover[ed]” the “ancient liberty” that Classical authors enjoyed, and has subsequently
rescued English poetry from what he calls, bitingly, “the troublesome and modern bondage
of rhyming.”
So—what does blank verse allow Milton to do?
First, let’s keep in mind that the most common rhyme of Milton’s day was the couplet,
or two-line rhyme.
But couplets, while easily memorized, also tend to encourage their authors to keep their
thoughts within the rigid demarcations of the rhyme itself.
Consider the start of “To His Coy Mistress,” published in 1681 by Milton’s friend, Andrew
Marvell: “Had we but world enough and time/ This coyness, lady, were no crime.”
Here we have a complete thought, in a tidy couplet of iambic hexameter.
Now, consider the opening lines of Book One of Paradise Lost:
Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe With loss of Eden till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire That shepherd who first taught the chosen
seed, In the beginning, how the heav’ns and earth
Rose out of Chaos.
(1-10) That’s the first 9 and a half lines of the
poem: and the first thing to notice about it is that it’s all one long sentence.
And that, in a nutshell, is what blank verse allows Milton to do: form long, complex, periodic
sentences.
Unconstrained by the need to make his lines rhyme, Milton is free to ignore the ends of
lines, instead using plenty of enjambment (that’s when there’s no punctuation at
the end of a poetic line, meaning you need to read right through to the next line without
pausing) – and this, in turn, allows Milton’s syntax to snake along without any pre-determined
ends in sight.
Note that in the opening lines of Paradise Lost I recited, the main subject of the passage
– Heavenly Muse – does not even appear until the 6th line!
Although it can be confusing to read Milton, then, it is never boring: because his blank
verse forces the reader to work hard to follow what one critic calls “the play of syntax
against lineation”: that is, the tension between the often unconventional order of
Milton’s words, and the steady meter of the iambic pentameter that nonetheless carries
each line along in a stately, elevated flow of pure language, free from the “bondage”
of rhyme.
After the success of Paradise Lost, blank verse – now sometimes known as “Miltonic
verse” – became more acceptable to poets and readers.
But precisely because Milton had used it so imperiously and ambitiously, it was primarily
deployed for serious and elevated topics, usually of some length.
If you wanted to be taken seriously as a poet, in other words, you had to use blank verse
at some point.
And this is exactly what William Wordsworth does in one of the first major poems of his
career: “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of
the Waye during a Tour, July 13, 1789” – or just “Tintern Abbey,” as it’s better
known – first published in 1798.
Here is how that poem begins: “Five years have passed; 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.
This is perhaps a little less complicated than Milton’s opening: we learn the subject
of the verse – the first-person narrator “I” – in the second line, and there
is a period near the end of the fourth line that creates two sentences out of these opening
eight lines.
But again, without the constraint of end-rhymes, Wordsworth is able to form poetic lines that
run into each other without stopping, compelling the reader to follow the flow of his memories
as he returns after five years to the banks of the Wye river, and begins to contemplate
what this pastoral scene has meant to him over the years.
I think it’s no coincidence that Wordsworth ends this opening passage with the observation
that the border between land and sky has become blurred, since this is nearly the exact spot
in the opening of Paradise Lost, where Milton recalls the biblical creation story of “heaven
and earth” being formed out of Chaos.
Just as Milton used blank verse to signal the elevation of his Christian narrative to
compete with the Classical epics, so Wordsworth attests to the value and seriousness of his
own “intellectual” development by putting it in the form of blank verse.
Among modern poets, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens are two of the best-known American
practitioners of blank verse, even though by the middle of the twentieth century, many
of their contemporaries were turning to free verse, which has neither set rhymes nor a
constant meter.
So now you know: if you want to make your mark as a poet, you’ll want to try writing
in blank verse at some point!
But be aware that readers in the know will inevitably compare your efforts to those of
Milton and Wordsworth: good luck!