Blank verse

Perhaps we are less verbose, now:  voluble, yes, but in shorter bursts.  I know that I look at the almost always extensive regularity of works written in blank verse, and my heart sinks, slightly.  The more turgid moments of the 19th century come to mind.   And this is a very odd association, given the form’s history, swathes of Shakespeare, all that drama.  But what I think of, to be honest, is Wordsworth, of struggling through the Prelude…  Oddly, in one way I think it’s a visual difficulty that I have with it - those long, regular towers of text – there seems no reasonable way to access them. 

So my own foray into blank verse is only 16 lines: not too exhausting.  I wrote a sort of an obituary to my cat, put to sleep this week.    I thought that the roominess of pentameter would afford space for the sort of descriptive tribute an obituary calls for, even if the achievements of a cat couldn’t stretch it to any great length.  I did my best with the meter, I think it’s more or less iambic.  Here it is:

Obituary

There’s no black cat now at the back window

shouting displeasure at failing doormen,

the vagaries of rain. No more scrape of

claws down the frame.  At last, she has no need

for cushions, laps, for fragments of tuna.

All gloss, a model type, she soothed no-one.

She brought no ambience, she was sullen

as unlit coal. She was a pitch, witching

complaint, fishwife among felines, Hammer

Horror perfect, come perpetually

to stay.  Always standoffish, she kept her

hurts interior: to the end still chased

shed leaves, like mice she could no longer catch. 

Our familiar, never lovable - 

and now she is a black gap at the door,

a silence on the morning’s window sill.