Blank Verse and Free Verse-Difference

 Okey, first, note that *blank verse mostly follows iambic pentameter,* however *free verse,* on the other hand does not follow *iambic pentameter.*

*Second,* blank verse *does not contain rhyming verses,* nevertheless contains proper metrical pattern. Like blank verse, the free verse also lacks rhyming lines but it is *without fixed and consistent meter and rhythm.*

Let me explain the difference through the following examples:

Blank Verse:

From Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

…bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,

From off the battlements of yonder tower;

Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk

Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;

Or shut me nightly in a charnelhouse,

O’er covered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,

With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;

Or bid me go into a newmade grave,

And hide me with a dead man and his shroud;

Note I have underlined the regular iambic metric pattern that follows unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables.

Free verse:

From “Samson Agonistes” by John Milton

But patience is more oft the exercise

Of Saints, the trial of their fortitude,

Making them each his own Deliver,

And Victor over all

That tyranny or fortune can inflict.

In the following poem, see there are stressed and unstressed syllables however they do not follow any fixed metrical pattern.