The Spenserian Stanza

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SPENSERIAN STANZA 1 SPENSERIAN STANZA . Th e Spenserian stanza has couplet has an extra foot. Length gives a sense of fi nal- been taken up by poets from Robert Burns to John ity, and the alexandrine makes a good home for the Keats to Alfred, Lord Tennyson; but as its name sug- poem’s frequently sententious pronouncements (“Th at gests, it has never escaped association with its inventor, blisse may not abide in state of mortal men” [..]). Edmund Spenser (–). Its combination of versa- Th ere is authority in the nod to epic *hexameter and in tility and idiosyncrasy may be unmatched: nine lines the evenhandedness of the usual medial *caesura. Th at long, with a mix of alternating rhyme and *couplets split down the middle, however, can also have a con- (ababbcbcc ), it proceeds in strict *pentameter up to its trary eff ect, introducing, with the help of an unstated concluding *alexandrine. Spenser’s principal sources beat at the joint, the native jounce and narrative carry were doubtless the Chaucerian *rhyme-royal stanza, of *ballad meter (“She turnd her bote about, and from which shifts, like his, to couplets at the fi fth line (abab- them rowed quite” [..]). bcc ), and the *ottava rima of It. epic (abababcc ). Th e Spenser uses this peculiar stanza to think with, and stanza is also shaped by the manifold narrative, imag- it suits his epic’s self-critical habits of mind: some- istic, argumentative, and visionary uses to which Th e times careening but more often pausing to doubt, to Faerie Queene puts it. declare, and then to doubt again. Other poets have Th e fi rst jolt the stanza gives its reader is that un- variously adapted these potentials. James Th omson’s expected couplet. At the beginning of book , we learn Castle of Indolence is full of Spenserian stops and starts; that Red Cross’s armor bears “Th e cruell markes of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes is more apt to swoon through many a bloudy fi elde,” and in the next breath, “Yet the middle of the stanza without taking a breath, as armes till that time did he neuer wield” (..). It is Tennyson does in “Th e Lotus Eaters.” Some of the the fi rst of many double-takes. Th at fi fth line can also stanza’s inheritors conjure Spenser’s resuscitated medi- usher in a new stage of argument or a new event; it can evalism, some his dreamy storytelling; all of them con- drive a point home with double force; it can off er a jure Spenser, who can never be cast out of the strange resting place in the middle of the stanza. Any rest, how- room he built. ever, is provisional at best, for the alternating rhymes ᭿ Empson; P. Alpers, Th e Poetry of “Th e Faerie Queene ” promptly resume. (); J. Dolven, “Th e Method of Spenser’s Stanza,” Some version of the same eff ect happens at the Spenser Studies (). stanza’s end, but this time, the line that completes the J. Dolven 66368/224aIcnng{/URGPUGTKCP"UVCP\C/t250kpff"""3368/224aIcnng{/URGPUGTKCP"UVCP\C/t250kpff"""3 8814214233"""34<48<62"RO14214233"""34<48<62"RO.

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Amanda Holton University of Reading
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