Spenserian stanza

The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains nine lines in total. The first eight lines are in iambic pentameter, that is consist of ten syllables, followed by a single alexandrine line in iambic hexameter, that is are made up of twelve syllables.Joseph Berg Esenwein, Mary Eleanor Roberts, The Art of Versification. Revised Edition, Springfield 1921, p. 113. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c-c."

Many poets used the stanza after Spenser, for example Lord Byron (Chlide Harold's Pilgrimage), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Adonais), John Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes)Spenserian Stanza at Encyclopaedia Britannica. and Alfred Tennyson (The Lotos-Eaters). Spenserian stanza remained a typical English form and it was never much popular outside England. Only few poets employed it in Central Europe, for example Juliusz Słowacki,Wiktor Jarosław Darasz, Mały przewodnik po wierszu polskim, Kraków 2003, p. 152. Jan Kasprowicz and Jaroslav Vrchlický. 

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Category:Poetry forms