On the justification of this peculiar amalgam there is little agreement. No doubt for certain swift effects free-verse is the natural and most serviceable medium. Many short poems in this irregular form are like snapshots or like rapid sketches as compared with finished paintings. But the ultimate æsthetic judgment must be precisely that of the snapshot as compared with finished painting. Nature is always wrong, says the paradox; art depends upon a deliberate selection of details and structure. It balances freedom and restraint, variety and uniformity, one against the other; and even when it appears spontaneous it is but the result of an unconscious choice which is itself born of long training or of the mysterious faculty divine. In very little of what at present is called free-verse does art have a real place. It is all freedom and variety, with almost no restraint and uniformity: all stimulation and no repose. There is sometimes a rapid alternation of verse rhythm and prose rhythm, which, in Bacon's phrase, may cleave but not incorporate; they succeed each other but do not melt into each other. Now and again, to be sure, this uncertainty, this very irregularity, powerfully represents the thought and emotion of the poem; but nevertheless there can be little doubt that except in the limited field of instantaneous flashes the most adequate and pleasing medium is the skilfully varied regularity of formal verse.[74]
The many kinds of free-verse are recognizable chiefly by the greater or less feeling of metrical form lying behind them. For convenience they may be distinguished, according as verse or prose predominates, as (1) irregular unrimed metre, (2) very free blank verse, (3) unusual mingling of metre and prose, a kind of recitative, and (4) mere prose printed as verse, or what may be called free-verse par excellence. A few illustrations will help to make clear the distinctions.
Of the first sort are the unrimed choruses in Milton's Samson Agonistes, the metre of Southey's once-admired Thalaba and the Curse of Kehama, and parts of Shelley's Queen Mab. Here the lines are irregular in length (as in the 'irregular' Pindaric odes), but they are usually felt as truly metrical, though they do not repeat a single pattern.
This, this is he; softly a while;
Let us not break in upon him.
O change beyond report, thought, or belief!
See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused,
With languished head unpropt,
As one past hope, abandoned,
And by himself given over,
In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds
O'er-worn and soiled.
Or do mine eyes misrepresent? Can this be he,
That heroic, that renowned,
Irresistible Samson?...
Samson Agonistes, 115-126.
The Fairy waved her wand:
Ahasuerus fled
Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist
That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove
Flee from the morning beam:
The matter of which dreams are made
Not more endowed with actual life
Than this phantasmal portraiture
Of wandering human thought.
Queen Mab, iii.
Thou tyrannous over-mastering Spirit, Lucifer,
Hear now thy guilt.
The first in glory amongst us all wast thou;
Nor did we grudge thee loyalty,
When of old beneath thy leadership against Yahveh,
And thereafter against the mild Galilean Godhead,
We waged war for dominion over the minds of man.
But perished now long since is the might of Yahveh;
And his Son, a plaintive, impotent phantom, wails
Over that faith, withering, corrupted, petrified,
For which he died vainly.
R. C. Trevelyan, Lucifer Enchained.
Green boughs stirring in slumber
Sigh at the lost remembrance
Of Aulon,
Golden-thighed, in the heart of the forest.
Here, where the dripping leaves
Whisper of passing feet
To the fragrant woodways,
The moonlight floods the forsaken tangled boughs
With loneliness
For Melinna, gone from the evening.
Edward J. O'Brien, Hellenica.
Very free blank verse, when taken in small excerpts, often seems devoid of metrical regularity. The reason for this is that in long poems much greater freedom is possible because the ear and the attention, accustomed for longer periods to the formal pattern, hold it more easily where it becomes faint. Examples of this approximation to prose have been given above, pages 43, 44. The famous first lines of Paradise Lost, if printed after the contemporary fashion of free-verse, would by very few be recognized as blank verse; and the same is true of many passages throughout the poem, and indeed throughout all long poems in blank verse.
Of Man's first disobedience
And the fruit of that forbidden tree
Whose mortal taste brought death into the world,
And all our woe,
With loss of Eden,
Till one greater Man restore us
And regain the blissful seat,
Sing,
Heavenly Muse,
That on the secret top of Horeb
Or of Sinai
Didst inspire that shepherd ...