Stanza. A stanza (Italian for "stopping place") is a grouping of the verselines in a poem, often set off by a space in the printed text. Usually the stanzas of a given poem are marked by a recurrent pattern of rhyme and are also uniform in the number and lengths of the component lines. Some unrhymed poems, however, are divided into stanzaic units (for example, William Collins' "Ode to Evening," 1747), and some rhymed poems are composed of stanzas that vary in their component lines (for example, the inegular ode).
Of the great diversity of English stanza forms, many have no special names and must be described by specifying the number of lines, the type and number of metric feet in each line, and the pattern of the rhyme. Certain stanzas, however, occur so often that they have been given the convenience of a name. Some literary scholars apply the term "stanza" only to divisions of four or more lines. This entry, however, follows a widespread application of theterm also to divisions of two and three lines.
A couplet is a pair of rhymed lines that are equal in length. The octosyllabic couplet has lines of eight syllables, usually consisting of four iambic feet, as in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" (1681):
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Iambic pentameter lines rhyming in pairs are called decasyllabic ("tensyllable") couplets or "heroic couplets." (For examples, see heroic couplet.) The tercet, or triplet, is a stanza of three lines, usually with a single rhyme. The lines may be the same length (as in Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes," 1648, written in tercets of iambic tetrameter), or else of varying lengths. In Richard Crashaw's "Wishes to His Supposed Mistress" (1646), the lines of each tercet are successively in iambic dimeter, trimeter, and tetrameter:
Who e'er she be
That not impossible she
That shall command my heart and me.
Terza rima is composed of tercets which are interlinked, in that each isjoined to the one following by a common rhyme: aba, beb, ede, and so on. Dante composed his Divine Comedy (early fourteenth century) in terza rima; but although Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the form early in the sixteenth century, it has not been a common meter in English, in which rhymes are
much harder to find than in Italian. Shelley, however, used it brilliantly in "Ode to the West Wind" (1820), and it occurs also in the poetry of Milton, Browning, and T. S. Eliot.
The quatrain, or four-line stanza, is the most common in English versification, and is employed with various meters and rhyme schemes. The ballad stanza (in alternating four- and three-foot lines rhyming abeb, or less frequently abab) is one common quatrain; when this same stanza occurs in hymns, it is called common measure. Emily Dickinson is the most subtle, varied,
and persistent of all users of this type of quatrain; her frequent use of slant rhyme prevents monotony:
Purple—is fashionable twice—
This season of the year,
And when a soul perceives itself
To be an Emperor.
The heroic quatrain, in iambic pentameter rhyming abab, is the stanza of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751):
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness, and to one.
Rime royal was introduced by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (the latter 1380s) and other narrative poems; it is believed to take its name, however, from its later use by "the Scottish Chaucerian," King James I of Scotland, in his poem The Kingis Quair ("The King's Book"), written about 1424. It is a seven-line, iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbec. This form was quite widely used by Elizabethan poets, including by Shakespeare in "A Lover's Complaint" and The Rape of Lucrèce, which begins:
From the besieged Árdea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathèd Tarquín leaves the Roman host
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire
Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire
And girdle with embracing flames the waist
Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrèce the chaste.
Ottava rima, as the Italian name indicates, has eight lines; it rhymes abababcc. Like terza rima and the sonnet, it was brought from Italian into English by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although employed by a number of earlier poets, it is notable especially as the stanza which helped Byron discover what he was born to write, the satiric
poem Don Juan (1819-24). Note the comic effect of the forced rhyme in the concluding couplet:
Juan was taught from out the best edition,
Expurgated by learned men, who place,
Judiciously, from out the schoolboy's vision,
The grosser parts; but, fearful to deface
Too much their modest bard by this omission,
And pitying sore his mutilated case,
They only add them all in an appendix,
Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index.
Spenserian stanza is a still longer form devised by Edmund Spenser for The Faerie Queene (1590-96)—nine lines, in which the first eight lines are iambic pentameter and the last iambic hexameter (an Alexandrine), rhyming ababbcbcc. Enchanted by Spenser's gracious movement and music, many poets have attempted the stanza in spite of its difficulties. Its greatest successes have been in poems which, like The Faerie Queene, evolve in a leisurely
way, with ample time for unrolling the richly textured stanzas; for example, James Thomson's "The Castle of Indolence" (1748), John Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1820), Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais" (1821), and the narrative section of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Lotus Eaters" (1832). The following is a stanza from Spenser's Faerie Queene 1.1.41:
And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rocke tumbling downe
And ever-drizling raine upon the loft
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swowne:
No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
As still are wont t'annoy the wallèd towne,
Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,
Wrapt in eternali silence farre from enemyes.
There are also various elaborate stanza forms imported from France, such as the rondeau, the villanelle, and the triolet, containing intricate repetitions both of rhymes and of entire lines, which have been used mainly, but not exclusively, for light verse. Their revival by W. H. Auden, William Empson, and other mid-twentieth-century poets was a sign of renewed interest in high
metrical artifice. Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" is a villanelle; that is, it consists of five tercets and a quatrain, all on two rhymes, and with systematic later repetitions of lines 1 and 3 of the first tercet.
One of the most intricate of poetic forms is the sestina: a poem of six sixline stanzas in which the end-words in the lines of the first stanza are repeated, in a set order of variation, as the end-words of the stanzas that follow. The sestina concludes with a three-line envoy which incorporates, in the middle and at the end of the lines, all six of these end words. (An envoy, or "sendoff," is a short formal stanza which is appended to a poem by way of conclusion.) This form, introduced in the twelfth century, was cultivated by Italian, Spanish, and French poets. Despite its extreme difficulty, the sestina has also been managed with success by the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney, the Victorian Algernon Swinburne, and the modern poets W. H. Auden and John
Ashberry.
From Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms
