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.
Also he will discover that it is not necessary to create a new stanza
form in order to write a great poem. The sonnet, at which every poet has
thrummed, still waits for a new master, and the "Recessional," perhaps
the greatest poem of the last quarter century, was written in one of the
simplest and oldest of stanzas.
V
SUBTLETIES OF VERSIFICATION