Robin’s Comments (group member since Aug 07, 2021)

Robin’s comments from the Formal Verse - Mostly group.

Is there a label for 'A Summer Night', as something that is neither "formal" nor "free"? There must be one, but I don't know it...

Where does Matthew Arnold stand, in the division between "formal" and "free verse", when he writes:

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

That's an excerpt from the middle of 'A Summer Night'. It rhymes (without a rhyme scheme), it's in iambics (unevenly of three, four or five feet)... Is that enough to call it "formal"? Did that use to be a good example of "free verse", and has the definition shifted over the last 150 years? I genuinely don't know.