Verse Forms

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The basic stanza used in old ballads, and adapted and varied by many poets, is a quatrain whose second and fourth lines rhyme, and often the first and third as well. Most typically the first and third lines are iambic tetrameters, and the second and fourth are iambic trimeters, but there is great variation: the second line may be a tetrameter; the first may be a trimeter; the fourth may even be a dimeter. Substitutions for the iamb, especially anapests, are also common. (See names of meters.)

The reason for all this variability is that the fundamental motive force of ballad stanza is not a poetic meter, but a musical one based more directly on time -- on a steady beat. The "tetrameter" lines fill a normal musical phrase of two or four measures; the "trimeter" lines end with a rest, a musical pause not indicated in printed poetry. If you read the examples below aloud, you will hear yourself automatically pausing at the ends of the shorter lines. The ballad stanza is closely related to hymnal stanzas -- also musical, of course.

Shown below are single-stanza examples from three important poets who have used the ballad stanza.

William Wordsworth

From "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," 1800. Full rhyme a b a b. Note how the expectations engendered by the form make us give "difference" its full three syllables (not "diff'rence"), adding to the emotional weight that surprises us in a word that is usually neutrally analytic.

Emily Dickinson

From poem #1129, written about 1868. This stanza is unusually regular -- in both rhyme and meter -- for Dickinson, who experimented widely with the stanza. Note how the simplicity and song-like nature of the form is set against the density of stress and the density of thought, which would be hard to hear if sung.

W. H. Auden

From "The Shield of Achilles," 1955. Auden alternates these double ballad stanzas with iambic pentameters. The contrast in stanza forms underscores the poem's contrast between the archaic scene (Achilles' mother Thetis with Hephaestos, armorer of the gods) with modern scenes of warfare, sophistication, and decay. Note the complex metrical substitutions, and the abrupt dimeter in the last line.

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Among verse forms, "blank verse" is singularly easy to describe: it's iambic pentameter that doesn't rhyme. (Don't confuse it with "free verse," which means verse that is nonmetrical. Free verse does away with meter entirely; blank verse may follow metrical rules very strictly -- it just doesn't rhyme. See Reference, free verse.)

This negative definition may make blank verse sound trivial. But rhyme was an important, apparently essential element of verse until John Milton -- with his skill in Latin (unrhymed) verse -- boldly renounced rhyme in the Preface to Paradise Lost.

Blank verse has most often been used for long poems. Instead of stanzas of set length, lines of blank verse are usually gathered into "verse paragraphs," unequal in length, with an indented first line to mark the division. At its inception, in other words, blank verse was a kind of radical compromise between prose and (traditional, rhymed) verse.

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A very brief Japanese whole-poem form (not a stanza): three lines, consisting of five, seven, and five syllables. It generally embodies a single, imagistic gesture. In Japanese the form entails a number of other expectations, such as an indirect reference to a season of the year, and various kinds of literary allusions. Here is a strikingly un-Japanese American version by Gregory Corso:

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A "heroic couplet" is simply a rhymed pair of iambic pentameter lines. During the eighteenth century especially, heroic couplets were a staple form for long poems, balancing continuity (from one pair of lines to the next, over many pages) against the consistently recurring satisfaction of rhyme. (For an example, see "Poets: Pope.")

The name of the form derives from its use for epic, or "heroic," subjects; but it quickly became a vehicle for everything from verse epistles to satires. Originally, it was thought to exemplify a kind of noble austerity, as contrasted with the elaborations of interweaving rhyme in stanzas. How "high" or "low" -- or "free" or "strict" -- a particular form seems, depends on the historical context into which it is introduced. Free verse, for instance, was radically revolutionary in the 1920's and 1930's; by the 1990's it was so standard as to arouse revolutionary opposition from "the New Formalists."

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"Ode" is as much the name of a kind of poem -- serious in tone and often addressed as praise to some person, object, or abstraction -- as it is the name of a poetic form.

The Greek poet Pindar developed one regular kind of ode, rare in English. The Latin poet Horace developed another kind, using a regular stanza within each poem but different stanzas from one poem to the next. This sort has had a wider influence in English. Andrew Marvel's "Horatian Ode" is a good example from the seventeenth century.

The Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century took up the ode partly because its connotations for the tone of the poem fit their aims, and partly because it offered greater freedom than the heroic couplets of the preceding century. (Similarly, they favored a greater flexibility in the metrical line than their predecessors.) While the poem retained a recognizable formal structure marked by rhymed stanzas, each poem discovered or invented a new particular form.

In the odes of Keats, the basic stanza combines a quatrain rhymed abab with a sestet (see "Sonnet") rhymed cdecde; but he uses several variations. Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" varies its stanzas more freely.

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Originally an Italian form, ottava rima (the name means "eight rhymed lines") is a stanza of eight lines, rhymed this way:

a  b  a  b  a  b  c  c

The most famous master of the form in English is Lord Byron, who probably learned it from Ariosto. Byron, stanza by stanza, hones the sting in its tail:

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Many verse forms used in English are related to Classical (Greek and Latin) forms -- distantly related, because the quantitative meters used in Classical poetry don't work well in English. (See quantity.) Sometimes, however, English poets have adapted Classical forms directly, usually by translating the long and short syllables of Greek and Latin into the stresses and slacks of English.

One form that is tried from time to time is the stanza invented by Sappho, the great early Greek lyricist. The stanza, put into accentual-syllabic form, goes like this (with ? used to mean either x or /):

Example (from a poem of my own called "A Little Song"):

This cheats a bit by relying on odd enjambments and frequent caesurae, but it shows the stress pattern. The form's attractiveness may have to do with the balance between a complicated and extensive rhythm in the first three lines and the swift simplicity of the last line. For better examples, see James Merrill's poem "Farewell Performance."

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A 39-line poem in six six-line stanzas and a final three-line stanza. In English, the lines are usually in iambic pentameter. (It was originally an Italian form, and the lines were hendecasyllabics, an eleven-syllable form.) Instead of rhyming, like most traditional stanzas the six-line stanzas repeat the same six end-words, in this shifting order:

1  2  3  4  5  6     (first stanza)

6  1  5  2  4  3     (second stanza, etc)

3  6  4  1  2  5

5  3  2  6  1  4

4  5  1  3  6  2

2  4  6  5  3  1

If there were a seventh stanza, it would return to the originally 123456 order. Instead, the final three-line stanza, or "envoi," uses end-words 1 and 2 in its first line, 3 and 4 in the second, and 5 and 6 in the third (though some shuffling of end-words in the envoi is common). An excellent example is Elizabeth Bishop's poem called "Sestina."

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Originally a Provencal (southeastern France) and Italian form, the sonnet has been around for at least 700 years. Its history is complex, but the basic formula and its two main variations are easy enough to describe. It is a poem fourteen lines long, in English almost always in iambic pentameter. Usually it is divided -- though not always by a visible gap -- into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The two parts often pose a question and then answer it, set a scene and then draw conclusions from it, etc.

The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is rhymed as follows:

a  b  b  a  a  b  b  a           c  d  e  c  d  e

though the sestet is often altered. The four rhymes each on a and b make for some difficulty in English, which is a rhyme-poor language compared with Italian.

The English or Spenserian or Shakespearean sonnet is rhymed as follows:

a  b  a  b        c  d  c  d        e  f  e  f        g  g

This variant slightly weakens the octave/sestet division, because the closed quatrains take over. The final couplet tends to serve as a fast summary of the poem. This form may be easier to write than the Italian, and harder to write well.

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Invented by Edmund Spenser for his long narrative poem, The Faerie Queene (1590): eight iambic pentameters plus an iambic hexameter, rhymed

a b a b b c b c c:

Here is one stanza from book III of The Faerie Queen:

Keats revived the form in his "The Eve of St. Agnes."

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A stanza of seven iambic pentameter lines, rhymed

a  b  a  b  b  c  c

Originally a Scottish form (it got its name because James I of Scotland wrote in it), this is the form used by Chaucer for his Trojan-war epic, Troilus and Criseyde.

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A nineteen-line poem, usually meditative or pastoral. Usually in iambic pentameter. It uses not only rhyme, but also two refrain lines -- whole lines that are repeated exactly (or with some variation). If we designate the refrains by capital letters (A1 and A2 -- notice that they rhyme with each other), and other rhymed lines by small letters, then the six stanzas of three lines each (four in the last) go like this:

A1    b    A2      

 a    b    A1      

 a    b    A2      

 a    b    A1      

 a    b    A2      

 a    b    A1    A2

Theodore Roethke's "The Waking" and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" are modern examples. The villanelle is originally an Old French form; the repeated rhymes make it difficult in English.

(The name is derived from "villa," meaning a post-Roman landowner's house in southern Europe. The people who worked on the villa's lands were called villeins -- "villain" is a fossilized class slur -- including the shepherds and goatherds whose lives could be idealized in pastoral poetry. That's the tradition from which the form springs.)