VERSE FORMS

---

The kinds of verse forms based on meter and rhyme are:

A. RHYMED VERSE: Rhymed verse consists of verse with end rhyme and usually with a regular meter.

The weakest way in which two words can chime
Is with the most expected kind of rhyme— A rhyme is stronger when the final words
Seem less alike than pairs of mated birds.

B. BLANK VERSE: Blank verse consists of lines of iambic pentameter without end rhyme. An example from Tennyson:

For now, the noonday quiet holds the hill:
The grasshopper is silent in the grass:
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.

C. FREE VERSE: Free verse consists of lines that do not have a regular meter and do not contain rhyme.

This sort of free verse can direct our attention as well as any iambic line, for instance, to what our language is made up of: it can break up compound words at line-ends, sometimes wittily, (like someone talking in winter of a whole hibernation of bears) like tripping hurriedly over what, when you look down, turns out to have been a grave stone.