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Quatrain.

Quintette.

Sestette.

Septette.

The stanza most frequently used is the Quatrain, or stanza of four lines. Most of the ballads and most of the familiar hymns are written in this. I take an example from Longfellow's "Psalm of Life."

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest !

And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

A less common, but not very unusual form is the Quintette, or five-line stanza. A beautiful example of this is found in Whittier's "Hampton Beach."

The sunlight glitters keen and bright,

Where, miles away,

Lies stretching to my dazzled sight

A luminous belt, a misty light,

Beyond the dark pine bluffs and wastes of sandy gray.

The Sestette, or six-line stanza, is much more common. Many examples are found in all the poets, and I take one from Longfellow's "Sandalphon."

When I look from my window at night,
And the welkin above is all white,

All throbbing and panting with stars,
Among them majestic is standing
Sandalphon the angel, expanding
His pinions in nebulous bars.

The Septette, or seven-line stanza, is illustrated by the following from Dr. Holmes' poem "The Chambered Nautilus":

Build thee more stately mansions, Oh my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

Dr. Holmes was also very fond of the Octette, or Octette. eight-line stanza. Take, for an example, this from "The Star and the Water Lily":

The sun stepped down from his golden throne,

And lay in the silent sea,

And the Lily had folded her satin leaves,

But a sleepy thing was she;

What is the Lily dreaming of?

Why crisp the waters blue?

See, see, she is lifting her varnished lid!

Her white leaves are glistening through.

Stanza.

A famous stanza, in nine lines, is that which was Spenserian used by Spenser in the "Faerie Queene." To eight rimed iambic pentameter lines he added a line with six feet, called an Alexandrine, and this combination makes the Spenserian stanza. Bryant used it in one of his earlier poems, called "After a Tempest."

The day had been a day of wind and storm;

The wind was laid, the storm was overpast,
And stooping from the zenith bright and warm
Shone the great sun on the wide earth at last.
I stood upon the upland slope, and cast
Mine eye upon a broad and beauteous scene,

Where the vast plain lay girt by mountains vast,
And hills o'er hills lifted their heads of green,

With pleasant vales scooped out and villages between.

These are the chief forms of stanzas used by the great poets. They may be varied greatly by the use

of lines of different lengths, and the management of rhythm, rime, and alliteration. In some extended narrative poems and in odes, the groups of lines are of irregular number and often exceed nine. In these The Strophe. cases it is better, perhaps, to use the term strophe, rather than stanza, although the meaning of the two words is essentially the same.

Single
Stanza
Forms.
The Sonnet.

There are some single stanza forms and other fixed forms of verse which should be spoken of in this connection. The Sonnet was originally borrowed from Italian poetry, but has become a beautiful and characteristic feature of English verse. It consists of fourteen iambic pentameter lines, arranged in two groups of eight and six. The eight-line group has its rimes arranged thus, a, b, b, a. That is, in the first and second quatrains, the first line rimes with the fourth, and the second with the third. Dr. Holmes describes the arrangement familiarly as "two rimes sandwiched between two others.” This rime arrangement has been made familiar by Tennyson's use of it in the poem "In Memoriam." The six-line group may be arranged in several different ways, a scheme frequently used being this: a, b, c, a, b, c. It is essential to excellence in the Sonnet, as in all single stanza forms, that the thought or emotion expressed should be such as can well be condensed into this brief compass. The Sonnet also calls for a distinct advance in the thought at the point where the eight-line group ends and the six-line group begins. It should be noted that the great English poets have not always held themselves strictly to the rules of

the Italian Sonnet. For example, Shakespeare's sonnets are fourteen-line iambic pentameter poems, but do not follow the rules of riming and grouping given above. A good example of the Sonnet is "The Broken Oar," by Longfellow.

Once upon Iceland's solitary strand

A poet wandered with his book and pen,
Seeking some final word, some sweet Amen,
Wherewith to close the volume in his hand.
The billows rolled and plunged upon the sand,
The circling sea-gulls swept beyond his ken,
And from the parting cloud-rack now and then
Flashed the red sunset over sea and land.
Then by the billows at his feet was tossed
A broken oar; and carved thereon he read,
"Oft was I weary, when I toiled at thee":
And like a man, who findeth what was lost,
He wrote the words, then lifted up his head,
And flung his useless pen into the sea.1

Forms.

As the Italians gave us the Sonnet, the French French have given us a number of dainty bright forms, either single stanza, or with a fixed number of stanzas. Of late years they have been favorites with verse writers for the lighter, brighter, more delicate poems, such as are sometimes called "Vers de Société." They are written under strict rules as to the number of lines and the arrangement of rimes, and are usually confined to two or at the most three rimes. They are called by various French names, such as Rondeau, Rondel, Ballade, Triolet, Villanelle, Chant Royal, etc. H. C. Bunner has

1 For the use of this poem we are indebted to the courtesy of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers of Longfellow's Works.

Rime.

written very beautifully in these forms; and as an example I give a Triolet by him called "Mignonette."

A pitcher of mignonette

In a tenement's highest casement;

Queer sort of a flower pot — yet
That pitcher of mignonette

Is a garden in heaven set

To the little sick child in the basement,

The pitcher of mignonette

In the tenement's highest casement.

Rime is the recurrence of the same vowel sound at the end of words or syllables, and usually at the end of the line. To make a good rime it is necessary: Ist, that the recurrent vowel sound should be in the accented syllable; 2d, that the preceding consonants should differ; and 3d, that the succeeding consonants should be the same. Thus "glad" and "bad" are good rimes, but "glad" and "hag" are not; neither are "bad" and "bade," though Chaucer, sometimes called the Father of English poetry, used such rimes as the last. "Sleepy" and "creepy" are good rimes, "creepy" and "defy" are not, because of the different sound of the last syllables caused by the accent. When the rimed accented syllable is the penult, the rime is called "feminine" or double; as 'finding," "binding." Rimes may be triple, as "slenderly," "tenderly"; and there are instances even of quadruple rime, as "dutifully," "beautifully."

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Alliteration is really rime at the beginning of words and syllables; and in the oldest English poetry it was the regular characteristic feature, whereas end

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