When you’re writing an essay or a story, you most likely write in sentences.
And you group those sentences into a paragraph.
It might look like this:
But a poet cuts up those sentences, into smaller units, like with a pair of scissors, cuts the sentences up into lines.
That might look something like this:
When a poet groups those lines into separate units, and separates them from the other groups
of lines, we call those groups of lines, those clusters of lines, those bunches of lines,
stanzas.
It might look like this:
Or…like this.
On one side, the stanzas are divided into groupings of two.
On the other side, groupings of three.
There are any number of reasons a poet would divide the lines into groups of two or three
lines or whatever number.
Mostly it’s to see how the new relationships, line to line, stanza to stanza, relate to
each other . Or cohere.
Or don’t relate, or don’t cohere.
The word stanza comes from the Italian.
And the meaning of that word tells you everything you need to know about what stanzas are, and
how they work.
In Italian, stanza is the word for Room.
Like the rooms of a house.
As with a house, you’ve got big rooms, and small rooms, rooms the same size, different
sized rooms.
Same with stanzas in a poem.
Two-line stanzas are the smallest rooms of a poem.
We call those stanzas "couplets."
Think of the couplet like a room with a mirror on two opposite walls.
The two sides reflect each other.
One line of the couplet reflects the other line of the couplet.
Here’s the British poet Thom Gunn’s incredible two-line poem about a problematic love relationship.
The whole poem, in one couplet, goes like this:
Their relationship consisted In discussing if it existed.
A couplet is a very powerful stanza.
But obviously there are others.
A triplet is a three-line stanza.
It’s mostly like a couplet with an extra line.
Haiku are probably the three-line stanza forms that most people recognize immediately.
You know, something like:
Waterlilies— One more thing
That will never love me.
Or the opening lines of Dante’s Divina Commedia, that goes:
In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood
Where the straight road had been lost sight of.
How hard it is to say what it was like In the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense
and gnarled The very thought of it renews my panic.
No stanza in English or American poetry is more important than the quatrain.
That’s the four-line stanza.
It’s the stanza for the old traditional ballad, which is one of the essential forms
in all of poetry, a form that tells our most ancient stories.
It’s the stanza of most pop songs and country songs.
One of the Billboard Charts All-Time Top Songs is John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.”
It starts:
Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try
No hell below us Above us only sky
Or check out this one from a Scottish ballad so old we don’t even know who wrote it.
It’s called Sir Patrick Spens.
It’s about a princess who has been stolen and taken to another island, and the king
needs to send a great sailor to rescue her.
It goes:
The king sits in Dumferling town Drinkin' the bluid-red wine:
'O whar will I get a skeely skipper To sail this ship O mine?’
Up and spak an eldern knicht, Sat at the king's richt knee:
'Sir Patrick Spens is the greatest sailor Who ‘ere sailed the sea.'
Now, if you know how to make a couplet, a tercet, and a quatrain, you’re in business.
Because the longer stanzas of 5, 6, 7, or 8 lines, are just combinations of those basic three:
the couplet, the tercet, and the quatrain.
Here’s what they look like all together, in the opening lines of Seamus Heaney’s
poem, “Digging.”
It’s a poem about his family’s potato farm in Ireland:
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
[couplet…that’s two lines..the thumb and the gun are mirroring each other]
Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging.
I look down [tercet: the first two lines set up the third one]
[I look down] Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
[quatrain…the four lines stanza…the story stanza…where the narrative gets more complicated]
Three different stanzas.
Like three different rooms.
And when you read them, and you experience whatever differences you notice in them, then
you know something about how stanzas work.
And you begin to notice the different coherences, special relationships, and cool possibilities
for new meanings.