Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)

"Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)" is a free-verse poem. As the name implies, the poem is free to look like it wants. It's not constrained by even-length stanzas or lines featuring the same number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Indeed, the difference in stanza length is almost as different as the gap between day and night. The first stanza is nine lines, while the second stanza is a brisk three lines.

In each stanza, the lines are uneven in length. Lines 6 and 9 jut out in Stanza 1, while Line 11 sticks out in Stanza 2. In Stanza 1 and 2, the number of syllables in a line varies. Line 1 has three syllables, while Line 6 has ten syllables. In Stanza 2, the second-to-last line, Line 11, has eight syllables, while the last line, Line 12, is but half that length.

At the same time, the poem produces a total of 12 lines—a tidy, even number. Thus, amidst the freedom, there's the subtle presence of deliberation. Although the poem doesn't have a formal meter, like iambic pentameter, it does have an internal meter or a somewhat predictable sound.