What's the Most Important Stanza?

Dawn Potter
In Italian the word stanza means “room.” For a poet who is working out the structure of a poem, that image is a compelling one. Room implies both enclosure and space, and stanzas in poetry entail a similar commitment to constriction and freedom. This is particularly evident in formal poems, where stanzas often frame the pattern of the form—for instance, rhymed couplets or rhymed quatrains. Even as these rigid patterns restrict a poet’s word choice, they may also push her to invent images or details that radically alter the trajectory of the poem.

Like the verse of a song, a stanza controls cadence, sound, and pacing. A poet  in progress often clusters and reclusters lines, searching for the combination that will propel the work into completion. As he wrote the 117 poems that make up his Sonnets for Chris, John Berryman shifted among stanza styles, most often settling on two per poem but frequently choosing one and occasionally even four. His choices had a significant effect on the dramatic movement of the individual poems, even though they all share the same form and subject matter.

 Consider Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet “The Rites for Cousin Vit,” which she chose to arrange as a single stanza rather than break into multiple sections. The accumulating density of the last five lines seems to mirror the crowded, vigorous details of the character’s life:

Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,

Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks

Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks

In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge

Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.

In contrast, the final five lines of Berryman’s Sonnet 54 convey a barrenness, which the stanza break enhances and illuminates:

Sprinting my ribbon down the world of green . .

Shadow to shadow, under tropical day . .

Flat country, slow, alone. So in my pocket

Your snapshot nightmares where (cloth, flesh between)

My heart was, before I gave it away.

The tension between constriction and freedom is equally important in free verse, where stanzas are not bound by form. In “The Grass on the Mountain,” Mary Austin demonstrates that carefully designed free-verse stanzas wield visual as well as sonic power. By varying the length of both her stanzas and the lines within them, she replicates the physical impact of silence and spaciousness:

Oh, long, long

The snow has possessed the mountains.

The deer have come down and the big-horn,

They have followed the Sun to the south

To feed on the mesquite pods and the bunch grass.

Loud are the thunder drums

In the tents of the mountains.

According to W. H. Auden, “the poet who writes ‘free’ verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself.” That is, a free-verse poet must invent her own version of structural coherence. The aim (in Auden’s acid terms) is to create “something original and impressive” instead of “squalor—dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.”

Yet Auden knew that formal poetry also carries risks. “In verse, as the Alka-Seltzer advertisements testify, the didactic message loses half its immodesty.” Without “the exposition of ideas,” even the most perfectly tuned terza rima ode becomes a radio jingle. Thus, like paragraphs of prose, stanzas must also function as units of thought.

Whether they are working in form or in free verse, poets frequently use stanzas to outline an argument or advance a dramatic situation. For instance, in Aphra Behn’s three-stanza poem “The Willing Mistress,”  the stanzas control the pace of a basic narrative trajectory. The first stanza creates the setting:

Amyntas led me to a grove

            Where all the trees did shade us;

The sun itself though it had strove

            It could not have betrayed us.

The place secured from human eyes

            No other fear allows,

But when the winds that gently rise

            Do kiss the yielding boughs.

The second stanza introduces the action of the situation:

Down there we sat upon the moss,

            And did begin to play

A thousand amorous tricks, to pass

            The heat of all the day.

A many kisses he did give,

            And I returned the same,

Which made me willing to receive

            That which I dare not name.

Finally, the third stanza leads the reader to an inevitable conclusion:

His charming eyes no aid required

            To tell their softening tale;

On her that was already fired

            ’Twas easy to prevail.

He did but kiss and clasp me round,

            Whilst those his thoughts exprest;

And laid me gently on the ground:

            Ah, who can guess the rest?

[This has been another installment from the draft of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet, currently under heavy construction and forthcoming in 2014 from Autumn House Press.]