THE STANZA. 33. A Stanza is a group of rhymed lines. The word comes from an old Italian word, stantia, an abode. 34. Two rhymed lines are called a couplet; and this may be looked upon as the shortest kind of stanza. (i) The most usual couplet in English consists of two rhymed iambic pentameter lines. This is called the "heroic couplet." 35. A stanza of three rhymed lines is called a triplet. (i) A very good example is to be found in Tennyson's poem of "The Two Voices," which consists entirely of triplets : "Whatever crazy sorrow saith, : No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death." 36. A stanza of four rhymed lines-of which the first (sometimes) rhymes with the third, and the second (always) with the fourth-is called a quatrain. (i) The ordinary ballad metre consists of quatrains—that is, four lines, two of iambic tetrameter, and two of iambic trimeter. (ii) A quatrain of iambic pentameters is called Elegiac Verse. best known example is Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." 37. A stanza of six lines is called a sextant. The (i) There are many kinds. One is used in Hood's "Dream of Eugene Aram," which is written in 4xa and 3xa; the second, fourth, and sixth lines rhyming. (ii) Another in Whittier's "Barclay of Ury," which has the first and second lines, the third and sixth, the fourth and fifth, rhyming with each other. (iii) Another in Lowell's "Yussouf," which has the first and third lines, the second and fourth, and the fifth and sixth rhyming. 38. A stanza of eight lines is called an octave, or ottava rima. (Pronounced ottahva reema.) 39. A stanza of nine lines is called the Spenserian stanza, because Edmund Spenser employed it in his "Faerie Queene." (i) The first eight lines of this stanza are in 5xa; the last line, in 6xa. (ii) The rhymes run thus: abab; bcbcc. 40. A short poem of fourteen iambic pentameter lines—with the rhymes arranged in a peculiar way—is called a sonnet. (i) This is a form which has been imported into England from Italy, where it was cultivated by many poets-the greatest among these being Dante and Petrarch, both of them poets of the thirteenth century. The best English sonnet-writers are Milton, Wordsworth, and Mrs Browning. (ii) The sonnet consists of two parts-an octave (of eight lines), and a sestette (of six). The rhymes in the octave are often varied, being sometimes abba, acca: those in the sestette are sometimes abc, abc; or ababcc. (iii) Shakespeare's "Sonnets " are not formed on the Italian model, and can hardly be called sonnets at all. They are really short poems of three quatrains, ending in each case with a rhymed couplet. (iv) The following is Wordsworth's sonnet on "THE SONNET Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp It cheered mild Spenser, called from fairyland To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew |