STANZA

 

THE Stanza

( Prepared by S. Sreekumar)

THE 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, 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 paragraphs in a composition point to the central idea/theme.  Each signals a new idea or may denote a change in tone/approach. They provide a sense of direction to the writer and the reader.  They also 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 point to the central theme of the poem. In a long poem (like The Faerie Queene), the stanzas provide relief to the reader. 

 

Stanzas might be regular or irregular. In The Faerie Queene, stanzas are regular. Each has nine lines: eight lines in iambic pentameter and a single alexandrine (iambic hexameter). However, the stanzas in Ode on the Intimations of Immortality (Wordsworth) and  Maud (Tennyson ) are quite irregular alike in length and structure, as Hudson points out. 

 

Modern poets and prosodists do not consider the stanzas as essential components of poetic compositions. For them, rhythm and stress are more important. They regard the 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 (in) blank verse or ottava rima because poetry without formal structuring—free verse and modes radically to its left—came well into its own in the twentieth century and has won many converts.

 

The Rhyme

 

The Rhyme plays a crucial role in defining the structure of a stanza. Hence, 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 metric 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 it was the invention of a barbarous age. Similarly, Ezra Pound did not consider rhyme as essential to poetry. But 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 24 sonnets and  Lycidas employ rhyme though he condemned it.] 

 

 

English poetry depends overwhelmingly on rhyme. But its use is disliked by many modern poets. Old English poetry used it in the form of alliteration, but from Chaucer’s time onward, End Rhyme became the dominant type. Today, this is the only type used. 

 

Types of Rhymes

 

Masculine rhyme

 

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

Feminine rhyme

 

This is a rhyme on the final two syllables: pester/fester, coldly/boldly, etc.

 

Triple rhyme

 

This 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

 

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

 

The Stanza

 

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 the rhyme scheme.

 

 

Types of stanzas in English Poetry

 

The 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. 

 

The 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

 

 

The 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)

 

The 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,

 

   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

 

The Quatrains

 

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

• They have a ‘two-part’ structure—ab, ab—making balance, parallelism, and antithesis (tough to accomplish in tercets or five-line stanzas) relatively easy. 
• Another difficulty with the tercet or five-line stanza is finding out three identical rhymes. 

 

Here we will mention some very popular quatrains:

The 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.

 

The 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

 

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 other stanza forms (less frequently used) other than the quatrains. They are the Rime Royal, Ottava rima, Spenserian stanza, and the sestet and octave of the sonnets. 

 

 

The 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

 

This is the most famous of all eight-line stanzas. The lines are iambic pentameter and 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.

 

  

   The stanza allows enough elbow room for the development of a theme. It permits detailed descriptions and significant progress in narration. The main difficulty is the problem of finding out so many suitable rhymes. Yeats solves 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. 

 

There is also the problem of justifying the extra length of the last line with a thought or image of sufficient magnitude. 

 

[Please see the blog on the Sonnet for details of Octave and Sestet.]

 

The Rhymeless Stanzas

 

Sometimes, poets use rhymeless stanzas. Collins’s “Ode to Evening” and Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle, Tears” are examples. Rhymeless poems are not very popular because 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, and the stanzas also vary in length. They are the Blank verse & Free verse.

 

The Blank verse

 

The Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. It is better to call the stanzas in the Blank verse, verse paragraphs. In this context, Dr Johnson quotes an ingenious critic who commented that the Blank verse seems to be verse only to the eye. There is an element of truth in the statement. When read aloud, it sounds like speech. Shakespeare’s dramatic blank verses are speeches/dialogues by the characters in the plays. 

 

The Free verse

 

The Free verse does not fit into any metrical pattern. The poet using the free verse creates a form without it. The 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 meter 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 free as it claims to be. Whitman is considered the father of free verse. 

This material prepared by Dr S. Sreekumar is for undergraduate students of Indian Universities.

These lectures on poetry contain seven topics:

i.                Metrics,

ii.              Persona and tone,

iii.             Rhythm,

iv.             Sonnet,

v.              Stanza,

vi.            How to read poetry, and

vii.           Appreciation of poetry.