Practical notes on blank verse

I like Bruno Dias's practical account of five-beat lines. I like it because starts from how-to questions, rather than with the metaphysics of verse. And, as Dias says, he must be one of the few people living who've written lots of blank verse to a deadline for money.

This post aims to provide a lesser sequel: the notes below add some extra things to think about when writing five-beat lines, once you can, you know, corral five beats into a line in the first place and perhaps if you aren't writing for money, to time.

A health warning

I can claim no absolute knowledge. I haven't plumbed the depths of the five-beat rising line. Others on the internet have. I'm just a hedge poet.

What I can say is that I've written substantial amounts of blank verse in five-beat lines--at least 15,000 lines, by a rough reckoning. I've also written several thousand lines of rhyming verse in five-beat lines. Perhaps my work is not especially good. I write to amuse my friends, not for publication by Faber. But it is experience, at the sharp end of things, and that's what I draw on here.

Managing enjambment

Okay, so, you can enjamb--you can slam straight on from one line into the next, no syntactic break. But why enjamb?

The first answer usually given is (I think?) to stave off monotony. Which's a legitimate reason, but one might hope it sometimes does more than that.

Locally, enjambment opens up the possibility for longer, more complex sentences. If you want those. I sometimes do! I think, like many things, they work best when not used constantly.

Locally, enjambment also lets you push emphasis into the middle of the line, and make even more clipped and stark sub-line units. Enjamb your way into a line, drop a full stop after the second or third beat, and you've really isolated the rest: the perfect place for something really pithy, and a final full stop. Or put the pith at the line's start and enjamb your way out.

You might also find it helpful to think about enjambment at the level of the passage, as well as at the level of just a couple of lines. If you step back, at the passage level, the choice between sustained enjambment and sustained end-stopping means a choice between

1. syntax in counterpoint with metrical lines, and
2. syntax in lockstep with metrical lines.

Do you want, in any given passage, the verse's bones to stand proudly on display, or do you want the verse pattern to shuffle back from the limelight a little? (Or, by keeping up unusually tight metre¹ in an enjambed passage, you (I think!) can keep the verse pattern more prominent.)

To some extent, I think we enjamb so as not to enjamb. That is, I sometimes want to write a very measured and regular passage of end-stopped lines, maybe containing a series of contrasts, say, and that's not going to stand out if things haven't gotten more fluid elsewhere.

Optional caesuras

The English blank verse line has no required, fixed-location caesura--no mandatory pause at one point in the line. (I think, probably.)

Many lines, though, do have a pause, a caesura, determined by local conditions: a syntactic or rhetorical caesura).

I think that the such pauses sound most natural after the second beat and after the third (x/x/|x/x/x/ or x/x/x/|x/x/).

Natural doesn't automatically mean desirable for you, the writer. A pause can sound marked and pointed if it comes after the first or fourth beats (x/|x/x/x/x/ or x/x/x/x/|x/)!

Mobile caesuras

Placement of the rhetorical caesura in the same place over too many lines risks monotony, And, if you're enjambing at the time, then you've recreated five-beat structures!

Consider the following nonsense, which I wrote for demonstration purposes. (I mark the rhetorical caesuras with a vertical bar, though the punctuation may signal them well enough.)

Assigning worth to things, | he tempts the mind
to treachery of self; | it seems unwise
so swiftly to obey. | And in those eyes
that flare with judgement's fire, | great beams persist
unnoticed to this day, | far heavier than
light specks of sinful dust. | So pause, and think.

Every line here has a caesura between beats 3 and 4. That means that there're consistently five beats from caesura to caesura. Therefore, as this passage gets into the swing of things, one begins to hear a different set of metrical lines:

Assigning worth to things,
he tempts the mind to treachery of self;
it seems unwise so swiftly to obey.
And in those eyes that flare with judgement's fire,
great beams persist unnoticed to this day,
far heavier than light specks of sinful dust.
So pause, and think.

That is, by enjambing every line but lining up the caesuras, we've just recreated five-beat lines. Doing this at any length probably means running the same risk, especially if anyone's listening to your work as well as or rather than reading it by eye. (I think listening always makes for the better option and the acid test!)

Meanwhile, dumping caesuras regularly in the same place within the line for a clutch of end-stopped lines risks making the lines' sub-units predictable and too staccato.

All of which is to say, when I'm writing with sustained enjambment, I try at minimum to keep a steady variation between the two most normal positions for caesuras. Which in its simplest form might run:

x/x/|x/x/x/
x/x/x/|x/x/
x/x/|x/x/x/

…and so on, though I hope not simply alternating like a metronome.

Of course, you can mix things up further by putting the caesura after beat 1 or before beat 5, by throwing in headless lines (/x/x/x/x/) or lines with initial inversion (/xx/x/x/x/), and by making sure some lines run straight through with no heavy pause at all. Ideally, you will do all these things for some better reason than merely to avoid monotony!

As with any warning, that all holds unless you actively want the effect--predictable caesuras can help you write a good chanted list or, as here in Pope, a detached description:

Her lively Looks a sprightly Mind disclose, ²
Quick as her Eyes, | and as unfix'd as those:
Favours to none, | to all she Smiles extends,
Oft she rejects, | but never once offends.
Bright as the Sun, | her Eyes the Gazers strike,
And, like the Sun, | they shine on all alike.

Pendant line-endings

A 'weak', 'feminine', or 'pendant' line-ending--I prefer the term 'pendant', for reasons which may seem obvious--is a line-ending with material going on past the last beat. Usually, that's a final and additional offbeat. The opposite of a pendant line-ending is a blunt line-ending. All the nonsense-lines I wrote above are blunt.

Assigning worth to things, he tempts the mind

But one pendant version of that line would be:

Assigning worth to things, he tempts your wonder

It is the -er of 'wonder' that makes the line pendant.

English speakers today struggle to take pendant lines of blank verse wholly seriously.³ As Dias says, they should therefore be used with some care. And if you're slamming stuff out to time for cash, that's probably all that needs to be said. But I'd add, for people writing in other circumstances, that with practice you can learn to avoid them absolutely.