okay, English majors

[ironymaiden]

 Sluts are only human. By a quirk
 Of unastonished nature, your obscene
 Decaying figure of vegetable fun
 Can drag a woman's heart, as though
 Heaven were dragging up the roots of hell.
 What is to be done? Something compels us into
 The terrible fallacy that man is desirable
 And there's no escaping into truth. The crimes
 And cruelties leave us longing, and campaigning
 Love still pitches his tent of light among
 The suns and moons. You may be decay and a platitude
 Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life.
 You may be as corrupt as ancient apples, well then
 Corruption is what I most willingly harvest.
 You are Evil, Hell, the Father of Lies; if so
 Hell is my home, and my days of good were a holiday:
 Hell is my hill and the world slopes away from it
 Into insignificance. I have come suddenly
 Upon my heart and where it is I see no help for.

is the above considered blank verse? and if it isn't, what is it? (besides an excerpt from The Lady's Not for Burning)

BTW, M&C, the internet says that iambic pentameter is a member of the set blank verse, but that not all blank verse is iambic pentameter. if you were trying to convey that earlier, i didn't get it.

Edited for the pedantic.

Comments

[buhrger]

i'll of course defer to HHF if he has a different take on this, but i'm pretty sure blank verse needs to have relatively consistent scansion. the webpage you cite calls for "unrhymed lines all in the same meter". the lines you've posted here don't meet that criterion - the first two lines are mostly alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, but the third suddenly breaks into dactyls on "figure of vegetable" - the rhythm gets broken at various other points as well. so i'm guessing it's not blank verse. which leaves free verse (i htink).

the pedant in me feels compelled to point out that when you said "all blank verse is not iambic pentameter", you meant "not all blank verse is iambic pentameter", but i'm going to go gag him right now, so don't worry about it.

[ironymaiden]

nah. i've fixed it. i can't talk about sets and then follow with that particular error. it was late.

[mrdorbin.livejournal.com]

My brain wants to call it free verse because the meter jumps around, even though it's a lot more structured than what I usually think of as free verse.

[gyngersnap.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. Somebody just wrote it and broke it up the way he/she saw fit or felt. Whatever it is, it describes perfectly how I feel today. Please pass the meds...