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By Root 392 0

the second line is written in perfect iambic tetrameter: "A GRASP / that HUSHED / the WORLD / is GONE." The fourth line is written in iambic pentameter, with a spondee substituted for the iamb in the final foot: "The ROADS, / the FROZ- / en TROUGHS / beTWEEN / CORN ROWS." The ninth line is written in perfect iambic trimeter: "I TURN / and FACE / the SOUND." And the final line is written in perfect iambic pentameter: "A FLAME / that GIVES / no HEAT / in EI- / ther WORLD." Meter may, and often does, appear in free verse, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by chance, but the cadences of free verse are not predominantly metrical. Despite its frequent iambs, "Pale Spring" doesn't create a predominant metric rhythm. Its lines vary in length from three to twelve syllables. Its stressed syllables vary from two in a line to seven. Instead of using meter, the poem paces itself down the page, balancing its phrases in a mixture of long and short lines. It makes use of the iamb, but it moves with the phrase.

Walt Whitman wrote free verse in the 1850s, and the last fifty years have seen free verse become the prevalent poetic style. Free verse began as a rebellion against meter. Beginning in the early years of this century, especially with the poems of William Carlos Williams, free verse has sought to sound more like natural speech—but not, of course, exactly like natural speech. Free-verse poems are as much artistic expressions of the imagination as formal poems are. They still craft language with precision and music. Robert Frost said that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. He favored formal poetry, and his poems reflect that, but free verse is more like racquetball. The ball doesn't pass over a net; it bounces immediately back off the front wall. Sometimes it ricochets off a side wall, or off the ceiling, or flies all the way to the back wall. Some shots bounce short off the front wall, and some bounce long. That's part of the magic and allure of free verse: It creates its own patterns and rhythms. It's free to follow those patterns and rhythms faithfully or to vary from them wildly, thus establishing new patterns and rhythms.

All the elements of poetry are available to free verse: imagery, figures of speech, the devices of sound, rhyme and even meter (as long as meter doesn't provide the primary rhythm). All the stanza forms are available to free verse: the couplet, tercet, quatrain and others. A free-verse poem may make use of several different stanza types, long and short. Or it may make use of sections (with or without titles); see Mark Drew's poem "My Father as Houdini". Here's a free-verse poem by Kathleen Halme, another contemporary poet. It uses both short and long stanzas:

WE GROW ACCUSTOMED TO THE DARK

No one

would know of this.

Two boys idling

an aqua speedboat

did not say no

to the simple question;

we stepped off

the dock and shot down

the black sash of river

past the tourist battleship

and the alligator circus,

past the raw bar's open

ears of oysters,

past the ladyghost in the library,

past five high church spires,

past the cotton shop where

we bought the summer

dresses floating on our bodies,

past her street, Orange, and

past my street, Ann,

past the live oaks dangling Spanish moss,

past the girl under the live oaks

now relieved of the burden

of her virginity,

past the stone wall's fondled holes for cannons,

past the square where slaves in chains were sold,

past the peanut stand and beaded pigeons,

past the scrapyard's parts

of red-brown merchant ships,

past the swampside's hulls of wooden boats,

past the fresh babies, and sound sleepers,

the glubbing clay pipes of plumbing,

and cloth-covered wiring,

past the slack lights

of all the last houses,

down the black sash of river,

back down, all the way to ocean.

There are some ready differences between Halme's poem and Clarke's, as there are between most free-verse poems. The lines of "We Grow Accustomed to the Dark" are generally shorter: The briefest is only two syllables; the longest is ten syllables. "Pale