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This month’s poetry prompt is based on the verse form I use most often because of its conversational rhythm and ease: blank verse. Blank verse is defined as verse that keeps to a regular meter but doesn’t rhyme. The definition includes a requirement that the verse be not only regular, but specifically in iambic pentameter (five iambs per line: in other words, ten syllables on every line, following a rhythm of da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM, etc.) Unlike most of the forms discussed in the poetry prompts, blank verse is not most commonly read, but heard. We are all exposed to blank verse at some point during our school years, and we’re usually forced to listen to it performed, or at worst, haltingly read out loud—because sooner or later, even the most unwilling reader must come to grips with the greatest blank verse poet of all: Shakespeare. The first known instance of blank verse in English dates from 1554, when the Earl of Surrey translated the Latin epic poem, the Aeneid, into English and transposed the Latin dactylic hexameters of the original into conversational-sounding English iambic pentameter. This rhythm, rhymed and unrhymed, was pleasant-sounding to the ears of English speakers and it was popular with Elizabethan poets and playwrights. Here are some sinister lines spoken by a murderous character created by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, in a play ominously titled Massacre at Paris: Where are those perfumed gloves which late I sent To be poysoned, hast thou done them? speake, Will every savour breed a pangue of death? Marlowe is supposed to have been the first writer to make blank verse truly usable in drama, but Shakespeare made it iconic. Here’s Juliet, yearning for sunset, which will allow Romeo’s arrival to consummate their marriage. Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. The last five lines of this excerpt from Juliet’s speech are among the most famous in English verse. Note that there is something special about iambic pentameter to an English speaker: the rhythm is not strained either by Juliet’s repetitive exclamations, which are realistic enough for a teenager in love, or by the lyrical flight at the end of the quote. Not only does Juliet’s voice vary, but several characters in the play have their own distinctive patterns of speech, and they all fit comfortably into iambic pentameter. Shakespeare was one of the first writers of what we think of as “classic” blank verse, but there have been many other classic blank verse poems since, including Milton’s long Paradise Lost, and a number of works by the Romantic poets. Tennyson’s richly musical Ulysses is one of my favorites. This is the aged Ulysses urging his companions to one last voyage: The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. Our well-read AC Benus has pointed out to me that one of the most-quoted works of modern times was also in blank verse--WB Yeats’s terrifying The Second Coming, written in 1920: The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? And lastly for this piece, there’s the American giant Robert Frost, who used the conversational flexibility of blank verse in his Death of the Hired Hand: “What did he say? Did he say anything?” “But little.” “Anything? Mary, confess He said he’d come to ditch the meadow for me.” “Warren!” “But did he? I just want to know.” So that’s blank verse—one of the oldest, most distinguished, and easiest of English poetic forms. Your poetry prompt, should you choose to accept it, is to: Write a poem in ten lines of blank verse (defined in the usual way as non-rhyming iambic pentameter) as an address to a friend or a loved one. OR, if you're feeling adventurous, write a speech (or speeches) for a character (or characters) whom you've created, all in blank verse.