Poetry Exercise: Blank Verse
Kwyjibo
Posts: 662
Blank verse is a tough one.
1) It is an iambic(unstressed followed by stressed) line with ten syllables and five beats.
2) It is unryhmed
3) It is traditionally associated with dramatic speech and epic poetry.
4) The lack of rhyme makes enjambment more possible and often more effective.
5) It is often identified as the poetic form closest to human speech.
I'm working on one now. I'll post it when I'm done. But here's an example.
Edward Thomas
Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have ever been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
if love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
1) It is an iambic(unstressed followed by stressed) line with ten syllables and five beats.
2) It is unryhmed
3) It is traditionally associated with dramatic speech and epic poetry.
4) The lack of rhyme makes enjambment more possible and often more effective.
5) It is often identified as the poetic form closest to human speech.
I'm working on one now. I'll post it when I'm done. But here's an example.
Edward Thomas
Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have ever been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
if love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway, is that its you, and that you're standing in the doorway.
I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral ring notebook. But in the long tresses of your hair--I am a babbling brook.
I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral ring notebook. But in the long tresses of your hair--I am a babbling brook.
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his overcoat still on him, he slumps low
from rushing in. His wife avoids his eye.
He roars across the room, "The world's a joke!
A literary man's society?
My work, not fit enough for print, they say?
I've seen more penned wit down on a farm
than what they write. Their kind are parasites."
_______
She thanks the servant for her tea, and stares
with loss upon bright patterns on the rug.
Upstairs, an unread manuscript, her own.
Her husband gives his unlit pipe a pull.
"One day they'll rue my genius, for sure.
Now, go to the piano, will you, dear."
Paddy Kavanagh, you were Behaned
I know, but lying in that hospital
you heard leaf whisperings, outside. You saw.
St Stephen's Green would show you not to care,
not to hear those poets in McDaid's
with passion large as George Moore's semi-colon,
and not to care what writer would begin
their book tomorrow, better than your own.
Paddy, show me where you saw bright river
fractals, breathing mysteries to shape
anew your first song, mirror of a field:
Fox flash of eye; red river streak of tail,
white reedwhoosh of a Now. O free me, Pat,
from all, to be romantically reborn:
Not caring, bold, in freedom from contention.
(Note: "Behaned" is a Kavanagh coinage, from "Behan". Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) and Brendan Behan (1923-64) endured a hateful rivalry that culminated in a Behan sibling's scuppering of Kavanagh's unsuccessful libel suit against a Dublin periodical in 1954; the stress of the failed, much publicised libel case drove Kavanagh to illness and an operation for lung cancer later that year. Kavanagh described his recuperation in Dublin, following release from hospital and during days spent on St Stephen's Green, as generating his romantic poetical rebirth and newfound philosophy of a benignant "not caring" for anything but the immediacy of poetic experience.)
Anywho, here's mine
Summer
The birds were picking at cracked asphalt
For wicked, rotten, useless remains.
The painters stamped on scaffolding above–
They reeked of primer fumes and cheap cigars.
One brush began to slip from a paint can
And finally falling, spinning fine white spray
As if a buzzsaw shooting out sawdust.
It clacked hard to the ground, precisely in
The center of the evil black circle.
Their startled beating wings and screams all came
Together and something beautiful arose.
I felt a breeze as you walked right past me
A cooling rush of air in this growling
Thunderous gut of summer. Thanking you
In privacy, I watched you stumble through
Your door. The heat would certainly end soon.
The birds rose up together, their ebony
Soft feathers floating. Perfect engineering.
I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral ring notebook. But in the long tresses of your hair--I am a babbling brook.
Yes, Olderman has a big sonnets thread, called Challenge. Worth checking out.
"This is where you were the day it happened,
This is what you saw, this image here,
and this is how you felt, and how you said
the world would never be the same again.
This is when you feared the world might end,
this moment that we captured on our lens
of you. You say the picture's been touched up?
We say we'll tell you what you thought and felt
that day and all the days that followed. Right?"
______
Solstice Road
There will be long red solstice light above
a road of cars, and faces will be gold
peering through a bright Decembered
dusk lit bough, through to dayblue moon,
the kiss bestirring deep green firsts of spring.