Question

How does Frost use irregular blank verse to affect the language of his poem?

Frost’s irregular blank verse serves to develop the poem’s rhyme scheme.

Frost makes the language sound like everyday speech through irregular blank verse.

Frost uses blank verse to naturally form a call and response.

Frost’s choices are meant to prevent readers from memorizing the poem.

Answer 1

Best answer: Frost makes the language sound like everyday speech through irregular blank verse.

Why: blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, and Frost deliberately disrupts that regularity (line-length shifts, substitutions of stresses, caesuras, enjambment, colloquial diction) to reproduce the rhythms and pauses of natural speech. The irregularities keep the voice conversational and flexible, control pacing and emphasis, and let syntax and idiom feel spontaneous rather than sing-song.

Why the others are wrong:
- It doesn’t develop a rhyme scheme: blank verse is unrhymed, so irregular blank verse isn’t used to create rhyme.
- It isn’t primarily a device for call-and-response: that’s a dramatic/dialogic technique and not an inherent effect of blank verse.
- Preventing memorization isn’t a likely or primary aim: irregularity can reduce predictability, but Frost’s intent was to make the poem sound living and speech-like, not to be hard to memorize.

Example: lines like “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” show how Frost favors natural phrasing and conversational cadence over rigid metrical regularity.