Blank verse

The term blank verse is applied to poetry which has a regular metre but lacks rhyme. (Poetry which lacks both metre and rhyme is free verse.) Most English blank verse is written in iambic pentameters, i.e., lines of five iambic feet.

Blank verse in the form of unrhymed iambic pentameters is the metre of many parts of Shakespeare's plays and of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. It is also the metre of many other long poems such as The Prelude by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Summoned by Bells by John Betjeman (1906-1984).

Here, as an example, are the opening lines of Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892):

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

A poet writing in blank verse may not always adhere rigidly to the requirements of the metre, and, particularly in a long poem, there are likely to be lines which involve some variation on the strict rhyme scheme. Sometimes one of the iambic feet in a line may be reversed or replaced by some other type of foot (such as a dactyl, an anapaest, or a spondee) - e.g., in the lines quoted above from Ulysses the first foot of the third line is 'reversed', that is replaced by a trochee ('matched with'). Sometimes an extra unstressed syllable may be added at the end of the line (so that the line has eleven syllables and a feminine ending) - as in the first line of Hamlet's famous soliloquy: 'To be, or not to be: that is the question' (Hamlet III, i, line 56). These variations may be intended to produce a particular effect (e.g., to surprise or alarm the reader), to give emphasis to a particular word, or simply to avoid monotony. (Another device which may be used to avoid the monotony of a succession of end-stopped lines is enjambment - notice that the third line of the quotation from Ulysses is enjambed.)