Laurel · Poems by form and metre

Free verse

Poems whose lines the scanner read as free verse. Below, what the metre is and how to recognise it, then every poem on Laurel measured as free verse, with how closely each keeps it.

What free verse is

Verse with no fixed beat and no fixed count. The lines keep the rhythm of speech and are shaped by their sense and their breath, and the line breaks do the work a metre does elsewhere. Whitman and most poetry after 1910.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself
Whitman, Song of Myself; the beats in capitals

How to tell

The lines vary in length and no pattern of beats repeats from one to the next. There is nothing to scan against, so any stress marks are the words’ own accents, not a metre.

Paste a poem of your own and Laurel will say whether it is in free verse, stanza by stanza. How to scan a line.

6 poems on Laurel in free verse

  1. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · 81%
  2. A Noiseless Patient Spider Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · 81%
  3. The Weary Blues Langston Hughes · 91%
  4. Preludes T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations · 90%
  5. The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter Ezra Pound, Cathay · 84%
  6. The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter Ezra Pound, Lustra · 84%

Each poem's metre was measured from its own words by the method described here; the figure beside a poem is the share of its stressed syllables that fall on the beat. Forms are named from the rhyme scheme and line count together.