Free Verse

Two Examples (Sandburg and Williams)

Here are two full poems in free verse from two of its great practitioners, the aforementioned Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams.

  They All Want to Play Hamlet
     Carl Sandburg

  They all want to play Hamlet.
  They have not exactly seen their 
       fathers killed
  Nor their mothers in a frame-up 
       to kill, 
  Nor an Ophelia dying with a 
       dust gagging the heart, 
  Not exactly the spinning circles 
       of singing golden spiders, 
  Not exactly this have they got 
       at nor the meaning of flowers—
        O flowers, flowers slung by 
       a dancing girl—in the saddest 
       play the inkfish, Shakespeare, 
       ever wrote; 
  Yet they all want to play Hamlet 
       because it is sad like all actors 
       are sad and to stand by an open 
       grave with a joker’s skull in the 
       hand and then to say over slow 
       and say over slow wise, keen, 
       beautiful words masking a heart 
       that’s breaking, breaking, 
  This is something that calls and 
       calls to their blood. 
  They are acting when they talk 
       about it and they know it is 
       acting to be particular about 
       it and yet: They all want to 
       play Hamlet.