There is no one structure or form to follow when writing free verse. The difficulty seems to lie in making sure the poem created is a coherent and cohesive piece of work no matter how it is written.

Having very few distinct rules or boundaries free verse does not depend on specific rhyme schemes or meters though it can contain both. Stream of consciousness poems are often grouped under free verse. Much of ee cummings worked would be seen here. His works have distinct structures which have visual and/or verbal impact when read aloud. The main thing to remember is that you can incorporate bits of other styles into a new one, or you can break rules completely when writing free verse; but either way, a coherent piece of work should be the end result.

the white deer by Jorge Luis Borges
Out of what country ballad of green England,
or Persian etching, out of what secret region
of nights and days enclosed in our lost past
came the white deer I dreamed of in the dawn?
A moment’s flash. I saw it cross the meadow
and vanish in the golden afternoon,
a lithe, illusory creature, half-remembered
and half-imagined, deer with a single side.
The presences which rule this curious world
have let me dream of you but not command you.
Perhaps in a recess of the unplumbed future,
again I will find you, white deer from my dream.
I too am dream, lasting a few days longer
than that bright dream of whiteness and green fields.

True Friend by Khahlil Gibran
If i could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things i’m finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there.

the best thing in the world by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What’s the best thing in the world ?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled,
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain,
Truth, not cruel to a friend,
Pleasure, not in haste to end,
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain,
Love, when, so, you’re loved again.
What’s the best thing in the world?
- Something out of it, I think

O sweet spontaneous by Edward Estlin Cummings
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

cows in art class by Charles Bukowski
good weather
is like
good women-
it doesn’t always happen
and when it does
it doesn’t
always last.
man is
more stable:
if he’s bad
there’s more chance
he’ll stay that way,
or if he’s good
he might hang
on,
but a woman
is changed
by
children
age
diet
conversation
sex
the moon
the absence or
presence of sun
or good times.
a woman must be nursed
into subsistence
by love
where a man can become
stronger
by being hated.

I am drinking tonight in Spangler’s Bar
and I remember the cows
I once painted in Art class
and they looked good
they looked better than anything
in here. I am drinking in Spangler’s Bar
wondering which to love and which
to hate, but the rules are gone:
I love and hate only
myself-
they stand outside me
like an orange dropped from the table
and rolling away; it’s what I’ve got to
decide:

kill myself or
love myself?
which is the treason?
where’s the information
coming from?

books…like broken glass:
I wouldn’t wipe my ass with ‘em
yet, it’s getting
darker, see?

(we drink here and speak to
each other and
seem knowing.)

buy the cow with the biggest
tits
buy the cow with the biggest
rump.

to a cat © Jorge Louis Borges
Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences
nor the arriving dawn more secretive;
you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure
which we can only spy at from a distance.
By the mysterious functioning of some
divine decree, we seek you out in vain;
remoter than the Ganges or the sunset,
yours is the solitude, yours is the secret.
Your back allows the tentative caress
my hand extends. And you have condescended,
since that forever, now oblivion,
to take love from a flattering human hand.
You live in other time, lord of your realm -
a world as closed and separate as dream.

Blank verse can seem simple, but is in fact quite challenging. True Blank Verse will contain a structured meter, yet remain NON-RHYMING.

The very structure of the poem will be as important to the message of the work as the words themselves. The rhythm becomes a key element to the poem. Blank differs from free verse in that there is an inherent structure and meter use in the poem.

What do you want to be when you grow up? by Grace Buller
I want to be the king of nonsense
The royal magician, the minstrel of joy
The jester of laughter
The knight that slays the dragon
That invades a grownup heart
I’m perfect exactly as I am
I only want to be larger
I only want to be more

The Dream by Jorge Louis Borges
While the clocks of the midnight hours are squandering
an abundance of time,
I shall go, farther than the shipmates of Ulysses,
to the territory of dream, beyond the reach
of human memory.
From that underwater world I save some fragments,
inexhaustible to my understanding:
grasses from some primitive botany,
animals of all kinds,
conversations with the dead,
faces which all the time are masks,
words out of very ancient languages,
and at times, horror, unlike anything
the day can offer us.
I shall be all or no one. I shall be the other
I am without knowing it, he who has looked on
that other dream, my waking state. He weighs it up,
resigned and smiling.

Wild Orphan by Allen Ginsberg
Blandly mother
takes him strolling
by railroad and by river
–he’s the son of the absconded
hot rod angel–
and he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,

so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown

to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears–a mythology
he cannot inherit.

Will he later hallucinate
his gods? Waking
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?

The recognition–
something so rare
in his soul,
met only in dreams
–nostalgias
of another life.

A question of the soul.
And the injured
losing their injury
in their innocence
–a cock, a cross,
an excellence of love.

And the father grieves
in flophouse
complexities of memory
a thousand miles
away, unknowing
of the unexpected
youthful stranger
bumming toward his door.

Lullaby by W H Auden
Lay Your Sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstacy,

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost.
All the dreaded cards foretell.
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought.
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

[there are no longer dancers] © Jim Morrison
There are no longer “dancers”, the possessed.
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all books and paintings burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed, all the arts of vicarious existence…

We are content with the “given” in sensation’s
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad
body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes
staring in the dark.

There is no one structure or form to follow when writing blank verse. The key seems to lie in using repetition or a specific meter count / scheme throughout the work. Examples of blank verse abound, perhaps reread a few by a favored author and see if you find any hidden there.

Ballads are poems that tell a story. They are considered to be a form of narrative poetry. They are often used in songs and have a very musical quality to them. Ballads originated with quatrains of iambic heptameter but has grown to include most lyrical prose.

The basic form for ballads uses quatrains of iambic heptameter (14 syllables per line) with a rhyme scheme of abcb defe ghih jklk. Though as with any thing written creatively; poetic license can be applied to bend the rules.

Example by Lonnie Adrift
I’ll tell a tale, a thrilling tale of love beyond compare
I knew a lad not long ago more gorgeous than any I’ve seen.
And in his eyes I found my self a’falling in love with the swain.
Oh, the glorious fellow I met by the ocean with eyes of deep-sea green!

He was a rugged sailor man with eyes of deep-sea green,
And I a maid, a tavern maid! Whose living was serving beer.
So with a kiss and with a wave, off on his boat he sailed
And left me on the dock, the theif! Without my heart, oh dear!

And with a heart that’s lost at sea, I go on living still.
I still am now still serving beer in that tavern by the sea.
And though the pay check’s still the same, the money won’t go as far
For now I feed not just myself, but my little one and me!

So let that be a lesson, dear, and keep your heart safely hid.
I gave mine to a sailing thief with gorgeous eyes of green.
Save yours for a sweeter lad who makes the land his home.
Ah me! If only I’d never met that sailor by the sea.
Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it!

Botany Bay (An Australian Ballad)
Farewell to old England forever,
Farewell to my rum culls as well,
Farewell to the well-known Old Bailey,
Where I used for to cut such a swell.

Chorus Singing, too-ral, li-ooral, li-addity,
Singing, too-ral, li-ooral, li-ay,
Singing, too-ral, li-ooral, li-addity,
Singing, too-ral, li-ooral, li-ay.

There’s the captain as is our commander,
There’s the bosun and all the ship’s crew,
There’s the first- and the second-class passengers,
Knows what we poor convicts go through.

‘Taint leaving old England we care about,
‘Taint cos we misspells what we knows,
But because all we light-fingered gentry
Hops round with a log on our toes.

For fourteen long years I have ser-vi-ed,
And for fourteen long years and a day,
For meeting a bloke in the area,
And sneaking his ticker away.

Oh had I the wings of a turtle-dove,
I’d soar on my pinions on high,
Slap baang to the arms of my Polly love,
And in her sweet presence I’d die.

Now, all you young Dook-ies and Dutch-ess-es,
Take warning from what I’ve to say–
Mind all is your own what you touch-ess-es,
Or you’ll meet us in Botany Bay.

Salome’s Dancing Lesson by Dorothy Parker
She that begs a little boon
(Heel and toe! Heel and toe!)
Little gets- and nothing, soon.
(No, no, no! No, no, no!)
She that calls for costly things
Priceless finds her offerings-
What’s impossible to kings?
(Heel and toe! Heel and toe!)

Kings are shaped as other men.
(Step and turn! Step and turn!)
Ask what none may ask again.
(Will you learn? Will you learn?)
Lovers whine, and kisses pall,
Jewels tarnish, kingdoms fall-
Death’s the rarest prize of all!
(Step and turn! Step and turn!)

Veils are woven to be dropped.
(One, two, three! One, two, three!)
Aging eyes are slowest stopped.
(Quietly! Quietly!)
She whose body’s young and cool
Has no need of dancing-school-
Scratch a king and find a fool!
(One, two, three! One, two, three!)

Lines Written In Early Spring
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev’d me my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose-tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trail’d its wreathes;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopp’d and play’d:
Their thoughts I cannot measure,
But the least motion which they made,
It seem’d a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If I these thoughts may not prevent,
If such be of my creed the plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man.

Don’t Teach Me How To Pen Them by John Bird
Stupid, tedious, boring, mulish, stubborn bloody sheep.
Bless them. Let me at them – watch me streak into the mob.
See them race full-tilt before me, see them prop and leap.
Hear the drumming of their hooves, listen to them bleat,
Watch me chase and round them, just inches from their feet.
For I am me and they are them and it’s what you do with sheep.
HUH-HUH HUH-HUH huh.

Well none got in the pen and a few are down the creek,
And the rest are scattered far and wide across the valley flat,
And I have broken every rule there is for herding sheep.
Yet deep inside I’m shouting: ’twas me that did all that’.
But retribution’s coming, here’s the Leader of Our Pack,
This champion of the showgrounds ‘ll harp on all I lack.

I know that I must learn some day the rules for penning sheep,
Know the craft, learn the style and study best technique;
It’s a very serious business, traditions to upkeep,
Best done with furrowed brow and be profound indeed,
Don’t waste a single sheep, don’t let the tempo slack,
Yes that’s the way to pen them and honour all our breed,
Perhaps I’ll be quite famous like, The Leader of Our Pack.

Pack Leader I’m so new in this magic world of sheep.
And I know that I should learn, some proper penmanship,
But please … not now … not yet.