It’s blank because it doesn’t rhyme, I tell my students. Think of other terms we’ve seen that render poems corporeal: the lines with missing heads or broken backs, three taps of a triple-jointed finger to make a foot . . . If you can trace the body of a sonnet by its rhymes’ schematics and affinities, or a ballad’s limbs by abxb bones, segmented as a caterpillar, then blank verse gives us a slate, a canvas, plentiful and stretchable, a roll of papyrus meant to be unrolled until you fix its length. I balance these ideas against the crux of necessary definitions, right as rain: “the meter deemed appropriate to serious topics, elevated and canonical in a national prosody.”1 Such elevation can intimidate, and now, next Tuesday, after Paradise Lost and Tintern Abbey, after the balcony where he and she made dialogic love, their pentameters as twisted together as sheets, after Aurora fantasized the phantoms of her mother’s posthumously painted face, after Ulysses has become a part of all he claims he met—now it’s their turn, their blank verse will be due. For this assignment they must go back and study Frost’s “Birches” and Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” then choose one to imitate:

中文翻译：

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选择音乐：关于“Birches”或“Sunday Morning”的空白诗句模仿

我告诉我的学生，它是空白的，因为它不押韵。想想我们见过的其他使诗歌有形的术语：缺少头部或背部断裂的线条，三指关节的三指轻敲以形成一只脚。. . 如果你可以通过韵律的原理图和相似性来追踪十四行诗的主体，或者通过 abxb 骨头来追踪民谣的四肢，分割成毛毛虫，那么空白诗句给了我们一块石板，一块帆布，丰富而可拉伸，一卷纸莎草意味着展开直到你确定它的长度。我将这些想法与必要定义的关键进行权衡，就像雨一样：“被认为适合严肃主题的米，在国家韵律中被提升和规范。”1 这种提升可能会令人生畏，现在，下周二，在失乐园和丁特之后修道院，在他和她谈恋爱的阳台之后，他们的五音步像床单一样扭曲在一起，在奥罗拉幻想了她母亲死后画的脸的幻影之后，在尤利西斯成为他声称他遇到的所有事物的一部分之后——现在轮到他们了，他们的空白诗句将到期。对于这项作业，他们必须回去学习弗罗斯特的“桦树”和史蒂文斯的“周日早晨”，然后选择一个模仿：