What's your favorite free-verse poem?

[Fretful_Porpentine]

@gigi

honour corruption villainy holiness
riding in fragrance of sunlight(side by side
all in a singing wonder of blossoming yes
riding) to him who died that death should be dead
humblest and proudest eagerly wandering

(equally all alive in miraculous day)
merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of the earth of the sky
knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun
merchant frere clerk somnour miller and reve

and geoffrey and all)come up from the never of when
come into the now of forever come riding alive
down while crylessly drifting through vast most
nothing’s own nothing children go of dust

That’s lovely, and thank you for introducing me to it, but it’s not free verse – there’s a clear pattern of slant rhyme, abab cdcd efef gg, and while the number of unstressed syllables tends to vary, the lines are all pentameters. It’s recognizably a sonnet, even if it’s looser of form than most.

[gigi]

@Fretful_Porpentine

That’s lovely, and thank you for introducing me to it, but it’s not free verse – there’s a clear pattern of slant rhyme, abab cdcd efef gg, and while the number of unstressed syllables tends to vary, the lines are all pentameters. It’s recognizably a sonnet, even if it’s looser of form than most.

:smack: Thanks. I was afraid of that. I was also going to post a favorite Gerard Manley Hopkins but it said something about “sprung verse” and a pattern to his too.

[Fatwater_Fewl]

I’ve Tasted My Blood, by Milton Acorn

If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
I’ve tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born to.

But my mother’s look
was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;
her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:
and I loved her too much to like
how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel…

Read the final two stanzas at the link in the title. It’s well worth it.