Blank Verse | Literary Term In English Literature | Definition with examples | Learning The Easy Way

Blank Verse:

Blank Verse is a kind of verse having no rhyming end but it has iambic pentameter.

A Blank Verse is a poem with no rhyme but does have iambic pentameter. That means it consists of lines of five feet, each foot being iambic, meaning two syllables long, one unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. So, Blank Verse should not be confused with free verse. It is "blank" only in the sense that its line do not rhyme. It is not metrically blank.

We find Famous lines from Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. It is the example of Blank Verse,

"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."

Blank Verse was first used in English by  Surrey in his translation of Virgil and first appeared in the drama in Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc. Later it becoming the standard verse form of Elizabethan theatre. It was chosen by Milton for Paradise Lost.

For example:

"How can I live without thee, how forgo
They sweet converse and love so dearly joined
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create anther Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no, no! I feel
The link of nature draw  of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe."

In the above example we find that the last word of any of these lines does not rhyme with the last word of any of the consecutive lines.