I was awoken from a fascinating dream last night. I was dreaming about Marlowe’s mighty line ( this sounds like a euphemism, but it’s not). I know I was reading Dr Faustus, but that’s about it. And near I was to making some discovery too, when I was brought rudely out of sleep.

It’s because lately I’ve been reading and attempting to write in blank verse. In truth, I know it shouldn’t be that hard. I used to write sonnets. Perhaps it’s the unrhymed lines which are causing the difficulty. Often such strictures as rhyming make it easier. Less freedom does that.

Or perhaps it’s something else. Blank verse was thought to be the perfect expression of human thought, as well as advantageous for rhetorical games. But it may be that the way we think is changing. Or at least the way I think: more punctuated, hypertextual versus rhetorical, or perhaps just less sucinct.

Maybe that’s what I was on the verge of discovery. I last remember a page of text, prosaic versus poetic with no line breaks, no appearance of Marlowe’s mighty line.

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