The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Spenserian StanzaNine lines of verse did EDMUND SPENSER takeTo forge the style that bears his name divine,A form that weaves and wanders like a snakeWith art all supple, subtle, serpentine,Constructing verse of intricate designWhose coils, caressing with sublime conceit,Engirdle and embrace each separate line:But Spenser, with an extra final beat,Unsnakelike ends his verse on hexametric feet.

An open form whose qualities have appealed to few in recent times is the SPENSERIAN STANZA, which Edmund Spenser developed from the ottava rima of Tasso and Ariosto for his epic, The Faerie Queen. But you never know, it might be the very structure you have been looking for all these years. The rhyme-scheme is seen to be ababbcbcc, and is cast in eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by an iambic alexandrine. Byron used the form in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, and Keats in ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’:Saint Agnes’ Eve–Ah, bitter chill it was!The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,And silent was the flock in woolly fold:Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he toldHis rosary, and while his frosted breath,Like pious incense from a censer old,Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Clive James is one of the few poets I know to have made something new and comic of the Spenserian Stanza: his epistolary verse to friends published in his collection Other Passports contains some virtuoso examples, well worth looking at if you are thinking of trying the form: it includes the excellent admonitory alexandrine, ‘You can’t just arse around for ever having fun.’ Martin Amis, to whom the verse was written, certainly took the advice, as we know. I am aware of few modern serious poems in the form, the last significant work appearing to be Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, although Cambridge University offers an annual⁵Spenserian Stanza Competition open to all comers of any age or fighting weight, which ‘fosters and recognizes student excellence in the writing of Spenserian stanzas’ and is sponsored by the International Spenser Society, no less. The past winners appear to have written theirs very much in the style of Spenser himself, complete with phalanxes of recondite archaic Spenserian words and syntax, rather than to have exhibited any interest in demonstrating the form’s fitness for modern use, which seems a pity.

ADOPTING AND ADAPTING

Other stanzaic forms are mentioned in the Glossary, the VENUS AND ADONIS STANZA, for example. Of course it remains your decision as to how you divide your verse: into general quatrains or tercets and so on, or into more formal stanzaic arrangements such as ottava rima or ruba’iat, or any self-invented form you choose. Ted Hughes wrote his poem ‘Thistles’ in four stanzas of three-line verse. Tercets, if one wishes to call them that, but very much his own form for his own poem.Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of menThistles spike the summer airOr crackle open under a blue-black pressure.Every one a revengeful burstOf resurrection, a grasped fistfulOf splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust upFrom the underground stain of a decaying Viking.They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.Every one manages a plume of blood.Then they grow grey, like men.Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.