RHYME AND RHYTHM IN POETRY
However, blank verse is unrhymed verse and until the advent of free verse it alone achieved wide popularity in English. Although used by the Earl of Surrey in translating Virgil’s Aeneid blank verse was employed primarily in drama. Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), however, was one of the first epic poems in English lo use it. In the nineteenth century Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1868- 1869), ‘Tennyson’s Il!y/l.s of the King (1 833)and Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868- 1869) were written in blank verse.
Sometimes stanzaic forms do not exist in poetry in blank verse as in the case of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1637) and Paradise Lost. This is true also of rhymed verse as in Samuel Johnsons ‘London’ (1738) and ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ (1 749). The texts are divided into units of sense as in prose paragraphs and’are thus called verse paragraph.
The recurring feature of English poetry is, however, a statnza which consists of a fixed number of lines and a well defined rhyme scheme. However, it is not so in the case of Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ ( which you will read in Block 5 ) which has lines of varying lengths as well as number of lines. Similarly Spenser’s Epithalamion is in the stanzaic form but the stanzas are constituted of lines of varying lengths and rhymes. In this case stanzaic form is reinforced by a refrain i.e. a line repealed at the end of each stanza.
The simplest form of a stanza is the couplet; that is two lines rhyming together. A single couplet in isolation is called a distich. When a couplet expresses a complete thought and ends in a terminal punctuation sign we call it a closed couplet. You have already read about the heroic couplet.
