Blank Verse |Literary Terms |Blank Verse Examples | Blank Verse Poem

Blank Verse |Literary Terms |Blank Verse Examples | Blank Verse Poem

Blank Verse |Literary Terms |

Lambic pentameter verse lines without rhyme at the end. An iambic pentameter line is a verse line of 5 iambic feet.In blank verse, the last word of a line  doesn't rhyme with the last word of any of the successive lines.

Blank Verse Examples | Blank Verse Poem

Add this under the above line"Thy sweet converse and love so dearly join'd,

To live again in these wild woods forlorn?

Should God create another Eve,and I

Another rib afford,yet loss of thee

Would never from my heart;no,no,I feel

The link of nature draw me;flesh of flesh,

Bone of my bone thout art,and from thy state

Mine never shall be parted,bliss or woe."

........(Milton: Paradise Lost,Book IX)

All these lines,like the scanned one,are in iambic pentameter and none of the last words of these lines rhyme with any other end-word.

|Blank Verse Examples | Blank Verse Poem|

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of IIeum?

Sweet Helen ,make me immortal with a kiss,

Her lips suck forth my soul:see where it flies!

...(Marlowe: Doctor Faustus,Act V,Scene I)

These mighty lines are written in iambic pentameter without end-rhyme.

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife,I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

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

......... (Tennyson:"Ulysses")

Poets and dramatists use blank verse to avoid the monotony of traditional rhyme schemes, to use a wide variety of differing tones, to add elegance and to match the heroic or  elevated voice.

.....(see Iamb;Foot; Heroic Couplet)
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