CHAPTER IV
STANZA FORMS
Roughly speaking, the stanza in verse corresponds to the paragraph in prose. It is a fixed division of the composition containing a certain number of lines arranged in a certain rhyming order. Very often each stanza contains a distinct and rounded thought, such as is found in a paragraph, though this plan of construction is not universally followed by any means. In sharp dramatic verse one must use a simple stanza form built so that each thought ends with the last word of the last line. But when the movement is languid the meter and stanza form may be more intricate and it is sometimes best to let the thought flow from one stanza to another without even the jerk of the period. The effect to be produced is everything and should determine not only the stanza to be used but the details of the treatment as well. The great poet can bend any meter or stanza form to his use, as witness Thomas Hood with his galloping stanzas in the “Bridge of Sighs,” but an ordinary mortal must produce his effects more obviously. The greater skill one has the greater liberties one can take in his choice of materials, just as a clever after-dinner speaker may say many things which from a less tactful person would be deemed offensive. Thomas Hood can write his dirges in dactylics with triple rhymes, but we must model ours on Gray’s “Elegy” or “In Memoriam.”
Still the variety of stanzas is so large that one should be able to fit almost any verse mood without the necessity of inventing a new form or turning an old one out of its beaten track. There are little dimeter couplets like Herrick’s:
“There thou shalt be
High priest to me.”
And there is the three-line stanza in many forms, of which this from Landor is an example:
“Children, keep up that harmless play,
Your kindred angels plainly say
By God’s authority ye may.”
And the four-line stanza—its name is legion.
The whole question resolves itself into the suitability of the form to the matter. The vehicle which carries the thought best is the one to be selected. The more appropriate the construction of the poem—the rhymes, the meter and the stanza—the better it will carry out the writer’s intention. Instead of hampering his thought it will assist it.
As a means of becoming acquainted with the wide resources which wait the verse maker, the student should copy and imitate every stanza form not familiar to him. In this way he will learn for himself why the Spenserian stanza used by Keats in his “Eve of St. Agnes” is good for one sort of narrative and why the ballad stanza used by Coleridge in his “Ancient Mariner” is good for another; why one sort of stanza sings merrily and why another is fitted for funeral hymns. Best of all, he will learn that he does not have to choose among “long meter,” “short meter” and “Hallelujah meter,” but that an almost indefinite field lies open for him.