Toe in the Water

On Free Verse

On Free Verse

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about this creature called free verse. Well, you have to give it some pondering if your entry into poetry was untutored in its historical forms and this (apparently easy) style stands ready to do your immediate bidding.

It seemed to me in those early days (when the fresh light of a new day was bright in the dawn of my youth and that sort of poetic nonsense) that the thing that divided free verse from prose was the flow of the thing, what the traditionalists would call meter. Something in me made me attend to this from the very start and I tried to avoid awkward and lumpy constructions, allowing the reader a smooth ride from the first verse to the last.

And then a voice from the past spoke to me and I understood (or, maybe, convinced myself) that the way I wrote poetry was a matter of genes. I had long been interested in the Anglo Saxon period, that time known as the Dark Ages, when England first came into being. There were things about those ruffians of long ago that I recognised in myself and I read everything I could get hold of that spoke of them and their culture. They were, as I saw it, my ancestors.

There came a time when I read (where, I cannot remember) a consideration of Anglo Saxon verse, the technique of those scops (as they called what we know as bards). It seemed that they were not interested in rhyme or formal meter but composed their tales, the best known of which is Beowulf, with careful attention to the flow of the words. They were, after all, going to sing these lines to the people and a difficult sentence construction could halt the flow and destroy the magic of the story.

Inevitably, my own thoughts on free verse came to mind and I discovered (or imagined) yet another connection to my distant forebears. And it remains so, in spite of all that I have learned about other poetic forms under the shelter of WdC’s roof. This might go some way towards explaining why I might experiment briefly with rhyme and form, but my heart remains with free verse and, when I have something to say that matters to me, it’ll be said in free verse.


Word Count: 394