Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

17.6 Free verse
Unit 17 Verse, metre and rhythm
Section 4 Poetic form

Metrical verse is verse in which the line’s length is measured by counting syllables in pairs or triplets. Verse whose lines are not measured in this way is non-metrical verse, and in English most non-metrical verse is more specifically free verse. In free verse, there is not any special principle to determine how the text is divided into lines. Consider for example these lines from William Blake’s ’Vala, or the Four Zoas’:

They sing unceasing to the notes of my immortal hand.

The solemn, silent moon

Reverberates the living harmony upon my limbs,

The birds & beasts rejoice & play,

And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.

Why is this text divided into lines as it is? There is no common structural principle based on the linguistic form of the poem (some lines are sentences but others are not, some end on pauses while others do not, etc.), and there is no rhyme or sound patterning or parallelism that consistently organizes the lines in the way that a metre consistently organizes lines. This lack of any consistent reason to divide the text into lines means that it is ’free verse’; the King James Bible is a good source of verse of this kind, and is a likely influence on Blake. In the twentieth century, free verse has become a very common type of verse.