11

Shapes of Things to Come

ONE OF THE MOST DEMORALIZING PROSPECTS FOR A READER IS page after page of unbroken verse. We see several hundred lines marching down the pages without even the saving grace of a paragraph break and our hearts just sink. Okay, my heart sinks. I know this because for years I confronted The Iliad at least once a year, and for all that I liked the experience, getting started on each of those books that crept up near a thousand lines was almost more than I could bear. But it was ultimately okay, because the nature of epic narrative is such that one really doesn’t have to lean in hard on analysis. Lyric poems, now, are a different proposition.

What are the alternatives to walls of unbroken verse? Stanzas. Strophes. Verse paragraphs. By “stanza” we mean a grouping of lines that will be repeated throughout a poem or section of a longer poem. “Strophe” and “verse paragraph” are largely interchangeable terms that indicate the number of lines may change from one group of lines to the next. Let’s start with the regular one.

First, a question: How long is a stanza? Well, how long do you need it to be? For practical purposes, the utility of a stanza seems to break down after ten lines or so. Since I never shy away from pushing things to their illogical extreme, what good would it do to have a thousand-line stanza? In epic poems, that would be called a book, and repeating that precise number of lines would be meaningless, since who would bother to count them? At the other end of the spectrum, a one-line stanza is equally useless, since it allows for no pattern. So between greater than one and fewer than many, what configurations make enough sense to actually occur in nature? Moving from smaller to larger, we have . . .

• Couplets are not often set off as stanzas of their own, but they have been much loved at various times in literary history, particularly in the eighteenth century of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Rhyming couplets are also favored among purveyors of comic verse in most periods.
• Tercet—three lines, the most famous of which is terza rima. They can have other uses, but Dante has largely dictated how they will appear. Their other important use is in the villanelle form, as we have seen.
• Quatrain—four lines, with a variety of rhyme schemes, the most common being ABAB and ABBA. Since it is the nearly perfect length for conveying a single thought, it is probably the most used stanza form.
• Quintain—rarely used as a form, the term is even rarer. Five-line stanzas will commonly contain unrhymed lines or will carry rhymes from one stanza to the next. The lack of symmetry, which seems an impediment, can sometimes be liberating.
• Sestet—six lines, reasonably common, and not only for sonnets. Sestets can be employed simply as the equivalent of paragraphs in a long poem, or the constituent element in the sestina, as we saw in the previous chapter.
• Rime royal—seven lines, first used by Geoffrey Chaucer in several poems, notably Troilus and Criseyde. The rhyme scheme is ABABBCC, and it can appear as a single stanza or two stanzas (ABA-BBCC) or even three (ABA-BB-CC).
• Octave—when speaking of sonnets; “ottava rima” is the more common term, and it has a specific rhyme scheme, ABABABCC. With the couplet after three alternating rhymes, the form lends itself to punctuating statements, which has made it a favorite of mock-heroic poems. As the name suggests, this one came via Italy, specifically from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose concept Chaucer would borrow for The Canterbury Tales. Other versions of the eight-line stanza exist, but this is the famous one.
• Spenserian stanza—nine lines, Edmund Spenser’s gift to English verse that isn’t The Faerie Queene (although it was first employed there). There are three features of note. First, the rhyme scheme is ABABBCBCC, so things interlock—somewhat. Second, the stanza is written in our very good friend iambic pentameter—except, third, the ninth line, which is iambic hexameter (six feet rather than five), called an alexandrine. It has been used by a number of other poets, including most of the British Romantics, but it is sufficiently uncommon that I never suspect its existence when I see more than four or five lines grouped together. It sneaks up on me.
• Ten-line stanza (and beyond)—they can occur, but they are sufficiently rare that no one has bothered to come up with a name, or have but it hasn’t caught on. Beyond here there be monsters.

Each sort of regular stanza has a set of practices, precepts, or outright rules that govern its practice. Once someone—a Spenser, say—introduces a novel form, his version becomes the standard. The quatrain has escaped this fate largely because it is so ubiquitous that no one progenitor can lay claim to it; the poetic canon is therefore pretty well split among the various available rhyme configurations. Which is just another way of saying, it’s all been done before.

But what about divisions that are irregular? We call those strophes or verse paragraphs, depending on who is doing the calling. Strophe comes from odes, which in turn come from Greek drama’s choral odes. Typically, the chorus engaged in a back-and-forth both literally and figuratively. As it debated a point, it moved in one direction and chanted the strophe. Then, having reached its end point, it moved in the opposite direction and gave out the antistrophe. Sometimes this to-ing and fro-ing would repeat; other times a resolution of sorts would be reached, and that was known as an epode. So: strophe, antistrophe, epode.

For some reason, students resist “strophe” in favor of “stanza,” which is too bad. “Strophe” gets you off the hook for any expectations that the second one will precisely resemble the first. I, for one, appreciate any term that offers me wiggle room, of which I need all I can get.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN STANZAS DON’T LOOK LIKE, WELL, STANZAS? When we hear “stanza,” we have an image of a block of text, a sort of black rectangle occupying a chunk of the white page. But that need not be the case. A stanza structure can be perfectly regular not in itself but in the repetition within a poem, as Marianne Moore illustrates in a poem we glanced at earlier:

The Fish

              wade

              through black jade.

                 Of the crow blue mussel-shells, one keeps

                 adjusting the ash-heaps;

                     opening and shutting itself like

              an

              injured fan.

                 The barnacles which encrust the side

                 of the wave, cannot hide

                     there for the submerged shafts of the

              sun,

              split like spun

                 glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness

                 into the crevices—

                     in and out, illuminating

              the

              turquoise sea

                 of bodies. The water drives a wedge

                 of iron through the iron edge

                     of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

              pink

              rice-grains, ink-

                 bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green

                 lilies, and submarine

                     toadstools, slide each on the other.

              All

              external

                 marks of abuse are present on this

                 defiant edifice—

                     all the physical features of

              ac-

              cident—lack

                 of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and

                 hatchet strokes, these things stand

                     out on it; the chasm side is

              dead.

              Repeated

                 evidence has proved that it can live

                 on what cannot revive

                     its youth. The sea grows old in it.

You will notice immediately that the stanzas have a distinctive appearance. When we see four-sided block stanzas, we kind of know what to do with them. But not so with Miss Moore’s fishy verse. We have to figure out some new strategy. Not that that’s hard. The stanza pattern is quite rigid: five lines in each one, with the first two lines rhyming with each other, as do the third and fourth. What, you didn’t notice? That’s the wildly different line length tricking your eye.

Two things are true about Moore’s titles: (1) they often act as the first word(s) of the poem and lead into the thing that seems to be the beginning, and (2) they may have very little to do with the actual subject under discussion. “An Octopus,” for instance, is really about a glacier with eight arms that she saw described in a National Park Service brochure as “an octopus of ice.” That description seems to have led to the thought: You know, that’s a perfect way to mislead my readers. Part of the fun of a Moore poem is getting disabused of our incorrect assumptions, or at least it is for her fans, of which I am one. Your mileage may vary.

That playfulness extends to her stanza construction. She is quite serious about the rules she sets for herself in this poem, but that doesn’t mean she needs to seem serious. Here is the seventh and penultimate stanza:

              ac-

              cident—lack

                 of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and

                 hatchet strokes, these things stand

                     out on it; the chasm side is

              dead.

No, it is not customary to achieve one’s syllabic ends by hyphenating words. On the other hand, there is no rule against it. Plus, it’s just funny, as is ending the previous stanza with “of”—how many lines, much less stanzas, of poetry end with “of”? I’m not coming up with a lot of instances off the top of my head, one more element that makes Moore such a rare bird. It is important, however, to note that she is doing this irregular thing in the service of play and humor; she does it because it’s funny.

And after all, why expend all that energy to come up with something new if it doesn’t please you?