You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [35]
The predominant meter and line length of Browning's Sonnet 32, and of poetic forms in general, is iambic pentameter: ta-DUM, ta-DUM, ta-DUM, ta-DUM, ta-DUM—ten syllables, five feet of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. Remember that after you establish the predominant rhythm, you should occasionally vary the rhythm by substituting a spondee, trochee or pyrrhic for an iamb. Some substitutions occur naturally; others are conscious decisions on your part to create emphasis and metric variety.
The poem's length depends on the form you choose, which means that it depends on the type and number of stanzas the form calls for. A stanza is a group of lines set apart from other groups of lines by a blank line or, when a blank line isn't used, by the rhyme scheme. Stanza forms are determined by their number of lines. (In some poems, especially free verse, the stanza isn't dictated by such formal concerns, but by units of thought, like paragraphs in prose; more on this later in the chapter.) The most common stanza forms are the couplet, tercet and quatrain.
The couplet is a rhymed two-line unit, although not necessarily a distinct stanza, as in these lines from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock:
Not with more Glories, in the Etherial Plain,
The Sun first rises o'er the purpled Main,
Than issuing forth, the Rival of his Beams
Launch'd on the Bosom of the Silver Thames.
Fair Nymphs, and well-drest Youths around her shone,
But ev'ry Eye was fix'd on her alone.
These couplets aren't distinct stanzas; rather, they're distinguished by their rhymes: Plain and Main, Beams and Thames, and shone and alone. Such couplets are called rhymed couplets. In contemporary poems, the couplet is sometimes used as a distinct stanza form, sometimes rhymed and sometimes not. Unrhymed couplets must appear as distinct stanzas; otherwise, there's no way to tell they're couplets.
The tercet is a three-line stanza, as in these lines from Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind":
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O Thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow . . .
The tercet originally called for a rhyme scheme of aaa bbb ccc and so on. Poets, however, are always tinkering, creating variations. The stanzas above are a variation of the tercet called terza rima, which interlocks the rhyme from one stanza to the next: aba bcb cdc and so on. A poem written in terza rima usually ends with a rhymed couplet, picking up the rhyme of the second line in the preceding stanza: aba bcb cdc dd.
The quatrain is a four-line stanza, which may be used with a number of rhyme schemes, including xaxa, aabb, abab and abba. Here are the opening quatrains, rhymed abab cdcd, of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
The quatrain is the most popular stanza form. It allows greater variations of rhyme scheme, and its four lines allow poets to develop complex thoughts and emotions within the space of a single stanza. It offers room for more play.
Other stanza forms are the cinquain (a five-line stanza), sestet (six lines), septet (seven lines) and octave (eight lines). Some poets have invented stanzas to suit their purposes. The English poet Edmund Spenser, for example, fashioned a nine-line stanza for his long poem The Faerie Queene. The first eight lines are written in iambic pentameter, and the ninth in iambic hexameter