1. Almost all the likely formal propositions in both metrical and free verse poems can be derived from one-, two-, three-, and four-line stanzas.
2. There are stanza shapes hallowed by some particular use that students of English literature used to learn. Rime royal, the seven-line stanza of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is one. Before the sonnet came to England, two stanzas of rime royal made a sort of sonnet, though for Chaucer it was a form used for narrative, and rhyme dependent if one is to hear its shape. Hard to imagine an unrhymed nine-line free verse stanza. One might measure out a narrative or expository or associative poem in nines, though. It seems possible, a sort of lumbering ordinariness if the lines tended to be roughly the same length. Or could be made of sets of three threes, with a pattern of lines of irregular length, for example, long, short, long, to make an intricate patterning.
And there is ottava rima, an eight-line stanza with a particularly thumping rhyme scheme that was supposed to have been originated by Giovanni Boccaccio and brought into English by Thomas Wyatt, which Lord George Gordon Byron used in Don Juan and Kenneth Koch revived in Ko, his epic poem about a Japanese baseball player. And the Spencerian stanza of The Faerie Queen. Nine lines with an intricately repetitive rhyme scheme and a slow alexandrine (twelve syllables) for a final line.
Rime royal and Edmund Spenser’s stanza came from a culture full of craft ornamentation in its weaving and embroidery. Were one to use them today, in their full rhymed forms, it’s not clear to me what in our culture their expressive force would be. Free verse seven- or nine-line stanzas will probably read as mechanical regularity or give a kind of architectural solidity (as in the editing of some Japanese films) to the progression of thought or narrative.
3. All of them, and others, are made out of ones, twos, threes, and fours. In the way that most sonnets are made from either a 4/4/3/3 pattern or a 4/4/4/2 pattern. And then within a line, we might hear one or two or three, even four phrases, which also make rhythmic units, as the line usually makes a rhythmic unit.
Two phrase units:
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Three phrase units:
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Four phrase units:
is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Five phrase units:
savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
And in this way the formal imagination is about numbers falling through numbers, as it is in music.
4. The idea of form contains some notion of measure. The things to be measured in poems might be syllables, words, stressed and unstressed syllables, lines, even syntactical structures. If three sentences have the same syntactical disposition:
The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way—
. . . we notice; and the noticing is a form of counting; we are, probably for very good evolutionary reasons, counters and noticers of patterns and disruptions of patterns at the core of our being. Line itself, of course, is in poetry a primary measure. The stanza another one. Though they can be enjambed, that is, not syntactically a completed unit of the kind that a sentence is, the poet’s choice to make a line invites us to see and usually to hear it as a unit. In the same way we are invited to sense the stanza—in its printed form, visually; in its aural form by way of some other marker, rhyme the most common—as a unit.
5. Rhythm, pattern, play. I think about this four-line poem by Blake we looked at before:
What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
The parallelism gives pleasure; it is a syntactical parallelism. And so does the small variation in the structure—to avoid a variation in the meter. The moving around of the verb is a little celebration of difference. And the rhymes of course make an emphatic repetition. We count those, too. Long I, long I, long I, long I. And the doubling of it in gratified, gratified. Here is a little Irving Berlin lyric, two lines:
What’ll I do, if you are far away
And I am blue, what’ll I do?
Notice the sound play, first. The first phrase, What’ll I do, has a particular rhythm, stressed syllable, unstressed syllable, unstressed syllable, stressed syllable. I’ve heard it called a cradle, because, marked, it looks like one: /_ _ /, and it’s so common to the rhythm of English speech that it functions—counting paired stressed and unstressed syllables as “feet” the way prosodists do—as a two-foot rhythmic unit, the way the double iamb—unstressed, unstressed, stressed, stressed—does. Chiasmus is the Greek name for the crossing pattern—
A B
B A
—in the Berlin lyric. The winsomeness and humor of it has to do with the mix of the rhyme—do, you, blue, do—and the truncation in the pattern, the skipping lilt in the cradle—what’ll I do—then three, slow, rising iambs—If you, are far, away and then the shorter two iambs, And I, am blue, and then the lilt of the cradle again. And the sense of distance created by the assonance and rhyme of are far—the human imagination making such expressive complexity in the simplest forms.
The double iamb is such a rhythmic signature in English because the sequence of preposition-article-adjective-noun is so common. A poem by Theodore Roethke, for example, begins like this: “In a dark wood the eye begins to see.” The eye begins to see functions like when you are far away, establishing the rising rhythm of iambs after the initial figure. And hearing it one could imagine how Berlin’s trick of crossing, rhyming, and shortening might work:
In a dark wood the eye begins to see.
Or could, in a dark wood.
6. So the pulsing and shaping made by rhythmic play is going on all the time in poems. You can learn how to write a sonnet or a pantoum, but the kind of expressive force that makes interesting poems come alive occurs more or less intuitively and out of sight, out of sight even of the writer who creates those effects. Poets mostly do not make a blueprint and then build an airplane. Mostly they listen and record what they are just hearing or have just heard.