STANZA

“The poetry of a people does not begin with the line but with the stanza, not with metre
but with music”.
Wilhelm Meyer, the German novelist and playwright.

‘Stanza’ is first recorded in English at the end of the 16th century, borrowed from Italian.
A stanza is a well-defined group of several lines of poetry having a fixed length, meter, or
rhyme scheme; the scheme is usually repeated. In Italian, the stanza means “a stopping
place, room (in a house), lodging, chamber, stanza (in poetry).” The Italian word comes
from Vulgar Latin ‘stantia’. (From Dictionary.com)

Prose compositions—essay, report, short story, or novel — consist of

paragraphs. All the paragraphs in a composition are connected to its
central idea/theme. Each new paragraph signals a new idea or denotes a
change in tone/approach. Paragraphs provide a sense of direction to the
writer and the reader. They relieve the eye and provide much-needed
rest when reading a lengthy composition.

A stanza is the verse equivalent of a paragraph. Like the paragraph in

prose composition, the stanza advances the development of thought in a
poem. Each stanza is linked to the central theme of the poem. In a long
poem like The Faerie Queene (Spenser), the stanzas relieve the reader.

Stanzas might be regular or irregular. In The Faerie Queene, stanzas are

regular. Each stanza contains nine lines: eight lines in iambic pentameter
followed by a single 'alexandrine' (iambic hexameter). However, the
stanzas in Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and
Tennyson’s Maud are “quite irregular alike in length and structure”, as
Hudson points out.

Modern poets and prosodists do not consider stanzas as essential

components of poetic compositions. For them, rhythm and stress are
more important. They regard issues related to stanzas with “benign
neglect”, as Ernst Haublein notes in his monograph The Stanza. Beum and
Shapiro agree : “No one today would pick up a recently published poem
and expect it to be blank verse or ottava rima” because poetry “without

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formal structuring—“free verse” and modes radically to its left—came well
into its own in the twentieth century and has won many converts”.

Rhyme

Since rhyme [or the absence of it] plays a pivotal role in defining the
structure of a stanza, we have to look at it in some detail.

The rhyme scheme in a particular poem is something that recurs from

stanza to stanza. The general metrical pattern and rhyme scheme are
usually the same in each stanza. In The Faerie Queene, a poem of epic
dimensions, Spenser has more or less followed the same rhyme scheme
throughout.

However, the Blank Verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton, and the
Free Verse of many twentieth-century poets like T.S. Eliot are unrhymed.
Milton and the Modernists of the twentieth century (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
and their followers) were very positive in their opposition to rhyme. Milton
believed that good poetry need not rhyme and that “rhyme was the

invention of a barbarous age”. Similarly, Ezra Pound never considered

rhyme as essential to poetry. He left it along with assonance and
alliteration to “the neophyte” (beginner).

[Shakespeare used rhyme in all his (154) sonnets and poems like The Rape of
Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. Milton’s sonnets (24) and poems
like Lycidas employ rhyme though he condemned it.]

Though many modern poets dislike rhyme, we have to admit that English
poetry is overwhelmingly rhythmic. Old English poetry used rhyme in the
form of alliteration, but from Chaucer, End Rhyme became the dominant
type. Today, this is the only type of rhyme used.

Types of Rhymes

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Masculine rhyme

is a simple monosyllabic rhyme: rang/sang, mad/sad, etc.

Feminine rhyme

Rhymes on the final two syllables: pester/fester, coldly/boldly, etc.

Triple rhyme

is quite unusual: eluding/deluding, revision/ division, etc.

Half rhyme

The middle vowels are different, but the opening and closing consonants
are the same: greet/great, battle/bottle, etc.

Eye rhyme

Rhymes for the eye, not for the ear. The spellings may appear to rhyme,
but there is no rhyme in the pronunciations: love/move, rough/bough, etc.

Consonance, assonance, alliteration, and onomatopoeia are some other

sound- patterns used by poets.

Consonance
Consonance is the recurrence of similar-sounding consonants in proximity.
The example is from Hamlet

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles…

Assonance
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in proximity. An example from
Keats:
Thou still unravished Bride of quietness

Thou foster child of silence and slow Time

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Alliteration

Alliteration is the recurrence of the same sounds at the beginning of

adjacent words. For example, these tongue-twisters: Round and round the
rugged rock the ragged rascal ran. /She sells seashells by the sea-shore.

Or

From Sonnet 30 of Shakespeare: “Then can I grieve at grievances

foregone.”

Onomatopoeia [Sounds echoing sense or meaning reinforced by sound] . For

example: ‘hiss’, ‘boom’. R.L. Stevenson’s “From a Railway Carriage”
suggests the sounds of the wheels over the railway track:

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches

Stanzas

Hudson points out that “the stanza forms of English poetry are so
numerous and varied that no complete tabulation of them” is easy. Here
we look at some of the popular types of stanza forms.

Though the number of lines may vary in different stanza forms, it is

uncommon to see a stanza of more than twelve lines. The pattern in a
stanza is decided by the number of feet in it and by the rhyme scheme.

Types of stanzas in English Poetry

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Couplets

They are stanzas of two rhyming lines in the same meter. Brevity is the
soul of a couplet. In a closed couplet, like the one given below from Pope’s
Essay on Man, the syntactical unit comes to an end with a full stop.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, (a)

The proper study of mankind is Man. (a)

Sometimes the couplet may be open as in Endymion by Keats:

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

In this open couplet, we can see that the idea does not conclude with the
second line but goes on to the third and fourth. There is no full stop at the
end of the second line or fourth line. The idea runs on.

Tercets

There are two types of Tercets—

 ‘Three lines rhyming consecutively’ — a- a- a. This is called a Triplet

 Three lines of interlocking rhyme (chain rhyme) — a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c.
This is called terza rima

Triplet—example—Tennyson’s Two Voices

1. Then comes the check, the change, the fall, (a)

Pain rises up, old pleasures pall, (a)
There is one remedy for all. (a)

Terza rima—example—Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” — a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c

O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

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Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Quatrains

The quatrain is a common stanza form in English poetry. The reasons for
its popularity are many.

 They can be a ‘two-part’ structure—ab, ab—making balance,

parallelism, and antithesis relatively easy, which is difficult to
accomplish in tercets or five-line stanzas.
 Another difficulty with the tercet or five-line stanza is finding out
three identical rhymes.

Here we will mention some very popular quatrains:

Ballad stanza—ab, ab

A slumber did my spirit seal

I had no human fears
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years

Here lines 1 and 3 are iambic tetrameters and 2 and 4 iambic trimeters.

Rubaiyat stanza
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, (a)
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou (a)
Beside me singing in the Wilderness— (b)
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! (a)
Four lines of iambic pentameter; the third line does not rhyme.

In Memoriam Stanza

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As the name suggests, it was employed by Tennyson in In Memoriam--
abba

I envy not in any moods

The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:

There are many stanza forms other than the quatrains. Rime Royal,
Ottava rima, The Spenserian stanza, and the sestet and octave of
the Sonnet are some of the other stanza forms.

Rime Royal

It is also called Chaucerian stanza—a seven-line pentameter rhyming—

ababbcc

Milton uses the form in “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and
Wordsworth in “Resolution and Independence”

All things that love the sun are out of doors;

The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops;—on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

The Ottava rima

The Ottava rima is the most famous of all eight-line stanzas. The lines are
iambic pentameter. They rhyme— abababcc. Byron’s Don Juan is the best
known ottava poem in English. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” is the best
modern example for ottava rima.

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

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The stanza allows enough space for thematic development.
It permits detailed descriptions and significant progress in narration.
The main difficulty is the problem of finding out suitable rhymes. Yeats
solved the problem by admitting half-rhymes or near rhymes.

The Spenserian stanza

For The Faerie Queene, Spenser invented a new stanza form—nine lines
rhyming— ababbcbcc. The first eight lines are iambic pentameter and the
last line is a hexameter. Keats used it in “The Eve of St. Agnes”.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

The stanza offers a lot of space for detailed descriptions. But it is rarely
used in English poetry mainly because of the difficulty of finding, again
and again, four words with b- and three words with c-rhyme. Again there
is the problem of justifying the extra length of the last line with a thought
or image of sufficient magnitude.

Rhymeless Stanzas

Sometimes, poets use rhymeless stanzas. “Ode to Evening” (Collins) and

“Tears, Idle, Tears” ( Tennyson) are examples. Rhymeless poems are not
very popular. When we read a poem we expect rhymes and feel cheated
in their absence. “A poem, no matter how self-sufficient, is never read and
experienced in a vacuum”—Beum and Shapiro.

In conclusion, let us look at two other popular forms of verse in English.

They are not strictly stanza forms. They do not follow any rhyme scheme,

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and the stanzas also vary in length. They are the Blank Verse & Free
Verse.

Blank Verse

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. It is better to call the stanzas

in Blank Verse, verse paragraphs. In this context, Dr Johnson quotes an
“ingenious critic” who commented that Blank Verse 'seems to be verse
only to the eye.' There is an element of truth in the statement. When read
aloud, Blank Verse sounds like speech. The dramatic blank verses in
Shakespeare are speeches/dialogues by the characters in the plays.

Free verse

Free verse does not fit into any metrical pattern. The poet using free verse
creates a form without the metrical pattern. Free verse is free from the
formality of metrical feet and syllable count. However, it is rhythmic unlike
prose and tends to fall into iambic patterns. Eliot’s and Whitman’s poems
are examples of free verse. In the ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’, Eliot
says: “…the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in
even the ‘freest’ verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw
as we rouse”. What Eliot means is that the free verse is not as free as it
claims to be. Whitman is considered the father of free verse.

Revised
8/10/21