Merriam-Webster defines "stanza" as "a division of a poem consisting of a series of lines arranged together in a usually recurring pattern of meter and rhyme : strophe." Technically, a strophe is a subset of stanza form, where "stanza" indicates a formal arrangement into rhyme, meter, syllable count, number of lines, that sort of thing, and "strophe" means a stanza without many or any of these elements. Strophic units are closer to common speech patterns than the song-like stanza. There is also such a thing as a verse "paragraph," which is more aligned with expository writing, analytical thought, than with common speech. But let's not over-complicate our project with that!
Speaking of our project, I've outlined it at the end of this post.
A stanza can be as simple as a visual break in the flow of a poem, which for most readers will also constitute an aural break or a break in breathing, even if only in the mind's ear. And of course a stanza can operate as a unit of meaning within a poem.
It's this last use that I want to introduce as a writing project, creating thematic strophes in a poem. But first, I want to review what stanzas and strophes are and how they work in certain poems. You'll see as you read on that you already practice versions of these forms and techniques in your own poems. After all, blocks of sound, rhythm and meaning are basic poetic elements; you'd have trouble writing your poems if you didn't already have some sense of them.
"Stanza" is the most regularized form of a poetic block. The word itself comes from the Italian word for "room," and so it may be helpful to think of a stanza as a little "room" of form and content, voice and meaning, that is, a place that is within but still separate from the larger space it is part of. In some structures, like an office building, the rooms are identical. So it is with certain forms of poetry. They are regularized. But in other structures, like your house, maybe, each room is unique and fit for purpose: some larger, some smaller, some L-shaped, some square, some even round. They are irregular, though still under the same roof. It's important to remember that a stanza, no matter how separate or irregular, is still part of, and therefore dependent upon a greater whole for its effect.
How does this work in practice? Think of any Elizabethan or Italian sonnet, for instance, the Spenserian and Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. This kind of sonnet has four stanzas: three quatrains and one couplet, with the couplet coming at the end. The three quatrains, like the uniform rooms of an office building, have the same syllable count in each line, the same or very similar patterns of stressed and non-stressed syllables (i.e., meter), and repeating patterns of rhyming words. Yet they provide you with three different ways of looking at a subject, three instances of a generality, three steps in a process, three levels of meaning; or with a beginning, middle and an end; or with a statement, a complication, and a resolution; or with point, counterpoint and synthesis; or any other mode of difference in three parts. The final couplet often comments on the ideas laid out in the quatrains. It confirms, undercuts, questions, concludes, summarizes, and so on.
Ballads, which generally are written in rhymed quatrains, can go on indefinitely, developing a story or a plot with characters, action, even dialog. They usually incorporate a refrain in the form of a repeating line or quatrain. Like sonnets, they are uniform in terms of line length, stressed and unstressed syllables, rhyme patterns. But they are more suited to story telling because ballads don't comment on themselves, they don't analyze the story they tell (except perhaps through a recurring refrain or tag line). They are narratives where sonnets are more rhetorical (i.e., based on argument).
Other kinds of stanza include couplets (Pope), tercets (Dante), sestets (think: sestina), and variations on all of these. But in every case, the model requires a set number of beats per line and a particular pattern of rhyme. And no matter how elegant the stanza's form, it is regularized like every office in an office building.
The point of a stanza is regularity: the form creates boundaries and expectations which the poem fulfills.
The term "strophe" originally referred to parts of what the chorus sings in ancient Greek drama: strophe, anti-strophe, and epode. These are old meanings that we needn't bother with here. Over time, "strophe" came to be associated with rhetorical units in free verse. In other words, stanzas that are of different lengths, often unrhymed (or rhymed irregularly), and without fixed or uniform metrical patterns. Or in still other words, the kinds of stanzas that most of us write today.
Strophes can operate as thematic units in the development of a poem (of course, so can the highly regularized stanzas of the English sonnet), or as units of emotional wholes or rhythmic wholes. Read far enough into "Song of Myself" and you'll get this sense of different sections rising and falling rhythmically, emotionally, and/or thematically. You can get a sense of it in "The Wasteland" and any of the Four Quartets, too.
Here's an interesting set of strophes from a poem by C.K. Williams:
from The Loneliness
Not even when my gaze had gone unmet so long, starved so long, it had gone out of my control;
the most casual passing scrutiny would make my eyes, though I'd implore them not to,
scurry, slither, dart away, to execute again their cowardly, abject ceremony of submission.
It was as though my pupils had extruded agonizing wires anyone who wanted to could tug.
What I looked at, what let approach me, had virtue only in so much as it would let me be,
let me hide further back within myself, let that horrid, helpless, sideways cringing stop.
His poem (his poems, all his books!) goes on at this emotionally strung-out pace and line length for ten stanzas, each a "tercet" in number, though hardly in metrical regularity; each laboriously self-regarding; like plodding forward through mud. Williams wrote this way all of his mature life. Some poems are in units of three, some in units of two, some in four, and some just wall to wall blocks of misery recounted and dissected. It's really wonderful stuff, despite how I'm making it sound here!
Look at this poem by David Young, titled "The Boxcar Poem":
The boxcars drift by
clanking
they have their own
speech on scored
wood their own
calligraphy
Soo Line
they say in meadows
Lackawanna quick at crossings
Northern Pacific, a
nightmurmur, Northern
Pacific
even empty
they carry
in dark corners
among smells of wood and sacking
the brown wrappings of sorrow
the rank straw of revolution
the persistence of war
and often
as they roll past
like weathered obedient
angels you can see
right through them
to yourself
in a bright
field, a crow
on either shoulder
Obviously, there's no regularity to this poem in terms of stanza length, line length, rhyme, or meter. Yet there is rhythm, one might say like the rhythm of a passing train of boxcars, a rhythm of narrowness, and there is emotional ebb and flow through industry, history, personal burden or grief. Note how each stanza--and these I'd call strophes, instead--notice how each strophe introduces something new to the poem, advances the "argument" of the poem a step farther.
The opening need only be simple statement of fact, a setting of a scene for the rest of the poem, just two short lines required. The second focuses on the sound of trains in different environments; note also what the poet is doing with the names of the train companies: linking them to sounds imagined at different places along a rail journey: meadow, crossing, night run. The third strophe turns to history, how we've used trains as hobos, soldiers, instruments of war and conflict. But consider the melancholy idea of emptiness in motion through a landscape, and therefore the oblique comment on history. And the fourth lifts the poem into the spiritual and the personal, bringing the speaker into self-reflection. These are blocks of meaning using our very common notion of boxcars moving through a prospect and the melancholy we inevitably associate with that image.
But my point here is that the strophes of the poem are organized around images and themes, or points of view and voice cadences, but not around line or syllable count or rhyme. The poet takes as many lines as he feels necessary to develop an image or a thought or a perspective or a tone of voice that will move the poem, each part of the whole defined by double returns on the typewriter.
Young's poem is more like my house with its different rooms built for different purposes: small, large, close, spacious, dark, bright, practical, social, etc.
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Our project for next Wednesday, then.
Write a poem in which you use strophes to indicate these kinds of shifts in perspective, tone, emotional resonance, thematic content, and so on. Try to write poetically, but without resorting to traditional poeticisms like rhyme, meter and, especially, poetic word order.
If you need more examples of strophes at work in a poem than I give here, just browse through your own collection of contemporary poetry, or read some Whitman or Eliot, and look for poems with "stanzas" of varying length and page real estate. As you read, try to identify what's going on in each unit, and how the units are linked (keeping in mind that "linked" might mean a departure in point of view or tone of voice from what you've just read).
One way to get started is to write like you talk with someone over coffee or a meal, or over the telephone. Let that be your first draft. Then edit to accentuate certain aspects of your own speech patterns, your personal pitch and rhythm, the way you stress some words but not others in a sentence, the way you run over certain syllables or separate them when you speak them. And so on. That is, again, try to write as you speak.
(Hint: I tend to speak in threes. Whenever I illustrate a point, I try to come up with three examples or a list of three things. I find this kind of pattern, which seems basic to my own speech and way of thinking, coming up often in my poems, almost but not quite subconsciously. Sometimes, I'll express a thought in three parts: point-counterpoint-synthesis, issue-complication-resolution, this-that-and the other. This tendency was probably educated into me, as a remnant of Scholasticism, a feature of analytical thinking. Regardless, I find it in my poems often enough that I count it as natural speech--for me.)
