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Monday, October 20, 2008

Monday Poetry Stretch - Blank Verse

The challenge this week is to write a poem in blank verse. Blank verse poems are not rhymed and iambic (10 syllables or five feet consisting of two syllables each). Here are some examples of blank verse.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.

From Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (Act III, Scene ii)


It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

From Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson


Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house

From Directive by Robert Frost
What kind of blank verse poem will you write? Leave me a comment about your poem and I'll post all the entries here later this week.

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