Introduction to stanza use in poetry

1. Poetic Forms & Genres The Stanza Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

2. Pattern Pattern: The use of stanza is an extension of patterning words and language in poetry. Patterning – rhythm, rhyme, repetition, originates in the oral tradition as ways of remembering words and narrative The ‘defamiliarisation’ of language Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

3. Russian Formalism ‘As perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic...The technique of art is to make objects seem unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the length of perception’ (Victor Shlovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, 1917) ‘Poetic Speech is formed speech’ ‘A dance is a walk which is felt... it is a walk which is constructed to be felt’ Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

4. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres ‘The distinctive feature of poetry lies in the fact that a word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst of an emotion, that words and their arrangement, their meaning, their outward and inward form acquire weight and value of their own’ (Roman Jakobson)

6. The word ‘stanza’ in Italian means room. In a simple practical way, the stanza in poetry has that figurative purpose. It is as self-contained as any chamber or room. And yet to be in it is to have the consciousness at all times that it also leads somewhere’ (Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms)Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

8. The stanza can be made up of lines of the same length (Isometric stanza)

9. If made of lines of different length = heterometric stanza

10. Loose grouping of lines and paragraphs of verse. Called quasi-stanzaic or verse paragraphSarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

11. Stichic Verse In stichic verse line follows line without any regular grouping of lines into stanzas. Poems written in blank verse, or rhyming couplets are usually stichic poems. E.g. Neoclassical verse essays; Milton’s blank verse epic Paradise Lost: Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

12. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres Whence and what art thou, execrable shape, That dar'st, though grim and terrible, advance Thy miscreated Front athwart my way To yonder Gates? through them I mean to pass, That be assur'd, without leave askt of thee: Retire, or taste thy folly, and learn by proof, Hell-born, not to contend with Spirits of Heav'n. To whom the Goblin full of wrauthreply'd, Art thou that Traitor Angel, art thou hee, Who first broke peace in Heav'n and Faith, till then Unbrok'n, and in proud rebellious Arms Drew after him the third part of Heav'ns Sons Conjur'd against the highest...[Book II]

13. ...back to the stanza Generally the number of lines in each stanza of a particular poem will stay the same – though there are exceptions e.g. the rondeau In most stanzaic poems, the underlying metre or pattern of rhythm stays the same. Heterometric stanzas include the ballad stanza, the Spenserian stanza Usually the rhyme pattern is constant Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

16. Can give an air of finality. Shakespearian sonnets end with a rhyming couplet in order to give a sense of conclusion.

17. Neoclassical verse and a sonnet’s concluding couplet are NOT stanzas in themselves

18. Couplets become stanzas if separated from other couplets by a space:Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

19. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres She makes her music, loosening her hands: The moment holds. But if the evening ends The coffee place will crowd, and trains will leave, And fields absorb what light the moon might give. (Matthew Welton) * In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, That snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger (Craig Raine)

21. A repeating word or phrase at the end of each couplet (traditionally)

22. Each couplet is distinct from the others – no enjambmentWhen you wake to jitters every day, it’s heartache. Ignore it, explore it, either way it’s heartache. Youth’s a map you can never refold, from Yokohama to Hudson Bay, it’s heartache. Follow the piper, lost on the road, whistle the tune that led him astray: it’s heartache. Stop at the roadside, name each flower, the loveliness that will always stay: it’s heartache. ... (Mimi Khalvati) Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

23. three line stanzas The triplet: all 3 lines rhyme aaa bbb ccc ... Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes (Robert Herrick ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’) Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent. (Thomas Hardy, ‘Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the Loss of the Titanic’) Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

25. Terzarima: ababcbcdc ...O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, a Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead b Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, a Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, b Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, c Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed b The winged seeds... Shelley, 'Ode to the West Wind'

29. Check the handout... For more examples of stanza patterns and their names Poets can & do invent their own forms e.g. George Herbert, John Donne If they don’t catch on, these stanzas don’t get a specific name. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

30. Analysing stanzas A stanza is the verse equivalent of a paragraph. Like each paragraph in a story or essay, a stanza advances the composition; again like the paragraph, an individual stanza may represent a complete change in tone and idea or only a very slight one. (Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum A Prosody Handbook) Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

31. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres Stanzas can be end-stopped (usually) or enjambed(sense and phrase carry on from end of one stanza to beginning of next) Look at how stanzas are opened and closed: Questions, exclamations, repetitions, apostrophes (address to animal, thing, or absent person)

32. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love? (Donne, ‘The Canonization’) Forlorn! The very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self (Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’) O sages, standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall (Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’)

33. Questions, questions... May be asked at the beginning of a stanza, and answered at the end: Sir Walter Raleigh A Description of Love: Now what is love? I pray thee, tell. It is that fountain and that well Where pleasure and repentance dwell. It is perhaps the sauncing bell That tolls all into heaven or hell: And this is love, as I hear tell. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

36. Progression between stanzas This is usually the case, although sometimes stanzas seem more interchageable than deliberately ordered. Such stanzas are sometimes known as ‘mobile stanzas’. Poems that have ‘mobile stanzas’ are sometimes constructed like lists: Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

38. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres Usually though, look at the progress of the poem and how each stanza moves towards the poem’s conclusion. This may be in the form of a straightforward narrative, or moving the argument or feeling of the poem on by .e.g contrast and opposition, or reinforcing and illustrating a theme.

39. Vertue (George Herbert) Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright! The bridal of the earth and sky-- The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie, My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die. Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season'd timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

41. E.g. ottavarima(8 line stanza pattern) has been used for comic purposes by Byron (‘Don Juan’) and for serious meditative purposes by Yeats (‘Among School Children’)

43. Yeats: from ‘Among School Children’ I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing; To study reading-books and histories, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way - the children's eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

45. E.g. Keats used the Spenserian stanza in his ‘Eve of St Agnes’, deliberately drawing on its associations with medieval narrative.

46. Keats in particular liked to develop stanza forms – ‘Ode to Nightingale’ uses the quatrain of a Shakesperian sonnet and the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet: ababcdecde:Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

47. Adaptation of forms My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness – That thou, light winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. (Keats, from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres

48. Adaptation of Forms That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river's level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. (Larkin, from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’) Sarah Law Poetic Forms and Genres