Rhyme-schemes, stanza patterns

1. Rhyme-schemes

One of the most basic functions of rhyme is to create connections between lines of poetry
and thus to form units larger than individual lines. Such units are therefore characterized by
certain patterns of rhymes which are termed rhyme-schemes. Rhyme schemes are usually
represented by lower-case letters, each successive letter of the alphabet standing for a new
rhyme as in the examples below:

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring;
The sky-lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells chearful sound
a Piping down the valleys wild, a I have lived with shades so long, a
a Piping songs of pleasant glee, b And talked to them so oft, b
b On a cloud I saw a child, a Since forth from cot and croft b
b And he laughing said to me: b I went mankind among, a
c That sometimes they c
c In their dim style d
d Will pause awhile d
d To hear my say; c

The smallest unit of rhyming lines is the couplet: two lines joined together by rhyme.
Couplets are a very popular form in English poetry. They appear in short lyrical poems (e.g.
in William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’) as well as in long narrative or argumentative ones (e.g. in
Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’).

Units of three lines are called tercets or triplets. Tercets rhyming aaa can appear, for
instance, in long poems written in couplets as a variation (e.g. in Pope’s ‘Essay on
Criticism’). Another typical use of tercets is to be found in the last section of the Petrarchan
sonnet. The last six lines in this form (also called the sestet) consist of two tercets
rhyming cde cde or cdc dcd or cde dce. Tercets are also used in the Italian form terza
rima(rhyming aba bcb cdc ded etc.), which was most famously used in Dante’s Divine
Comedy and was adapted in English poetry, and unrhymed tercets are used in the haiku.

A unit of four lines of poetry joined by rhyme is called a quatrain. Quatrains are perhaps
the most frequently occurring rhyming units in English poetry. The most common rhymes
schemes in quatrains are the alternating (abab) pattern (also called crossed rhyme, alternate
rhyme) and the enclosing (abba) pattern (also called enclosed rhyme, envelope rhyme.
Another typical rhyme scheme in quatrains is the xaxa pattern where x stands for a blank or
unrhymed line-ending. This form is typically used, for instance, in the ballad stanza.

Rhyming units consisting of more than four lines can also be named (e.g. quintain/quintet/
cinquain, sexain/sextet, septet, etc.); however, these terms are less frequently
used. Couplet, tercet, and quatrain, by contrast, are very useful terms; they are often used
because units of two, three and four lines tend to form parts of larger stanza patterns.

2. Stanza patterns

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Stanza is a very widely used term to refer to groupings of poetic lines. Most generally
defined it is any group of lines that is distinguished in the poem from other groups of
lines. Some poems have a single stanza pattern and others have multiple stanza patterns that
work together. Unless you are following a form, your stanzas can have any line length, rhythm
pattern, and may or may not rhyme.

COMMON STANZA PATTERNS:

COUPLET

A poem, or a stanza within a poem, that has a cluster of two lines.

TERCET/TRIPLET

A poem, or stanza within a poem, that has a cluster of three lines.

QUATRAIN

A poem, or a stanza within a poem, that has a cluster of four lines. Sometimes quatrains are two
couplets put together.

Poets can mix couplets, tercets, and quatrains to form longer stanza patterns.

CINQUAIN/QUINTET

A poem, or a stanza within a poem, that has a cluster of five lines. One pattern created by Adelaide
Crapsey near the turn of the twentieth century has a set number of syllables for each line: two, four, six,
eight, and two. The poem is usually a single sentence or thought.

SESTET/SEXTET

A poem, or a stanza within a poem, that has a cluster of six lines. A sestet can be made with a
combination of couplets, tercets and/or quatrains.

SEPTET

A poem, or a stanza within a poem, that has a cluster of seven lines. A septet can be made with a
combination of couplets, tercets and/or quatrains.

OCTAVE

A poem, or a stanza within a poem, that has a cluster of eight lines. An octave can be made with a
combination of couplets, tercets and/or quatrains.

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II.2. Combinations of accentual syllabic verse and rhyme patterns

Accentual syllabic verse came to be the English equivalent of classical metrical poetry, and
its origins are also closely connected to the impact of classical verse. Accentual syllabic
verse forms began to take root in the English soil after the Norman conquest, under the
influence of the neo-Latin French poetry, and were confirmed and became the standard in
English poetry when the Italian rediscovery of classical antiquity (the Italian Renaissance)
started to have an influence in England (from the 14th century onward). As the Latin, French
and Italian poetry on which these English verse forms were patterned contained rhymes,
accentual syllabic verse was also combined with rhymes from its origin. Some of the forms
and stanza patterns that resulted from this combination became so firmly established and so
influential that a student of English poetry needs to be familiar with at least the most
important of them.

As the combination of the most frequently used verse line in English poetry and the
simplest rhyme scheme the heroic couplet has enjoyed vast popularity in the history of
English poetry. It was first used by the late 14th century poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (the first
great master of accentual syllabic verse in English poetry). The largest part of the Canterbury
Tales was written in heroic couplets. Because of the changes that took place in the English
language between Chaucer’s time and the Modern English period (from the 16th century),
later readers of Chaucer’s poetry did not realize that he used this form. In the 16th century,
therefore, the form had to be reinvented. When it was reinvented it was first used to indicate
closure (as in the English sonnet form or at the end of the acts of a play) but then began to
function as a form on its own right. When George Chapman published his translation of
Homer’s Odyssey in this form (1614-15), the heroic couplet became closely associated with
heroic poetry and was established as the English equivalent of the hexameters of heroic
Greek and Latin poetry. Throughout the 17th and 18thcenturies the form experienced a
glorious career. It was the standard form of late 17th century heroic tragedies, it was the form
of John Dryden’s translations of Virgil and Ovid, of Alexander Pope’s translation of
Homer’s epics and of a great number of original poems by Dryden, Pope, Oliver Goldsmith,
Samuel Johnson and others. Because of the Romantic preference for blank verse, the heroic
couplet became less prestigious and influential in the 19th century but some distinguished
poets still used it in some of their major poems (e.g. George Gordon Byron in his verse tales
and in his ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’).

Heroic couplets can be used to achieve widely differing effects. However, their most typical
use is to be found in 18th century poetry. Each couplet, in this 18thcentury use of the form, is
a separate unit of sense, which makes a very clearly structured, lucid and controlled
communication of ideas possible. 18th century heroic couplets often achieve epigrammatic
precision and conciseness, the ultimate crystallization of the idea they express. Thus several
18th century heroic couplets, especially those of Alexander Pope, have become proverbial in
English (See two famous examples here).

For very different uses of the form see Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and Wilfred
Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’.

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Blank verse: iambic pentameter lines without rhyme.

As blank verse is blank, that is, it does not use rhymes, it is not really a combination of
accentual syllabic verse and rhyme schemes. However, as the form was a rival of the heroic
couplet for centuries, it is perhaps appropriate to discuss these two next to each other.

Blank verse was first introduced into English poetry by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the
16th century as an adaptation of an Italian form, which he used in his translations from
the Aeneid. By the end of the century it became a very prestigious form, being frequently
used for example in Elizabethan drama. Some of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies use
blank verse extensively. The association of blank verse with heroic epic poetry was
confirmed when John Milton used the form in his epic Paradise Lost (undoubtedly the
greatest poetic achievement in English literature besides Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and
Spenser’s Faerie Queen). Milton believed that blank verse was a more appropriate English
equivalent of the unrhymed hexameters of the classical heroic epic than the heroic couplet,
since the latter was strophic (used stanzas) while Greek and Latin epic poetry, just as blank
verse, was stichic (used similar metrical lines but without a stanzaic arrangement).

In the 18th century heroic couplets replaced blank verse as the dominant form of heroic
poetry. However, the Miltonic blank verse tradition continued to have an influence through
the poetry of James Thomson, Edward Young, and William Cowper and became more and
more powerful as the century went by, until it almost entirely defeated the 18th century heroic
couplet tradition. By the turn of the 19th century the most influential group of young poets
(Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey) all preferred Miltonic blank verse to Popean heroic
couplets.

Because of its close association with heroic poetry, the characteristic effect of blank verse is
stately and dignified. By the time of the Romantics, however, a new set of associations had
been added to the form. Blank verse was typically used by the Romantics in a type of
personal, confessional poetry in which the unrhymed iambic lines came to suggest casualness
and spontaneity, the free flow of the speaker’s emotions and thoughts.

Look at two excerpts from two famous blank verse poems.

Rhyme royal: iambic pentameters organized into seven-line stanzas rhyming ababbcc.

The form was most famously used in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and is therefore
sometimes also called the Troilus stanza. Chaucer also used Rhyme Royal in two of
the Canterbury Tales. The form was later used by King James I of Scotland, monarch and
poet, hence its name. (See an example of the use of the form in modern poetry.)

Spenserian stanza: a nine-line stanza form rhyming ababbcbcc and consisting of eight
iambic pentameters and an alexandrine (iambic hexameter).

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The form was invented by the greatest poet of the English Renaissance, Edmund Spenser
(1552-1599), who modified the Rhyme Royal stanza pattern to suit his needs in his great
allegorical epic poem The Faerie Queene. After two centuries of relative neglect, the
Spenserian stanza was revived by the Romantics and was famously used in Byron’s Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage and in Keats’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’. (See an example)

Octosyllabic couplet: iambic tetrameters rhymed in pairs.

Less formal than the heroic couplet, this form was often used in light, playful, comic poetry
(e.g. Jonathan Swift’s birthday poems to Stella). Another famous use of this form is to be
found in Milton’s Il Penseroso where it acquires a more serious tone. (See an example)

Ottava rima: a stanza formed of eight iambic pentameters rhyming abababcc.

Originally an Italian form used in burlesque poetry. In English the most famous use of the
form is to be found in Byron’s Don Juan. (See an example)

Terza rima: (usually) iambic pentameter lines arranged in tercets, rhyming aba bcb cdc
efe etc.

Originally an Italian form, which was used in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The most famous
English adaptations are to be found in Percy Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and in his
‘Triumph of Life’.

The sonnet: fourteen iambic pentameter lines rhymed in various patterns; the most
frequently used rhyme patterns in English are the Petrarchan, or Italian (abbaabba
cdcdcd/cddcee/cdecde – there is considerable variation in the rhyme scheme of the last six
lines) and the English, or Shakespearean (ababcdcdefefgg).

The Italian, or Petrarchan, Sonnet is written in iambic pentameter. The sonnet consists of
fourteen lines, separated into an eight line stanza and a six line stanza. The first stanza (with
eight lines) is called an octave and follows the following rhyme pattern:

a b b a a b b a.

The second stanza (consisting of six lines) is called a sestet and follows one of the following
rhyme patterns:

cdcdcd cdecde cdeced cdcedc

c d d c d c.

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The final two lines cannot end in a couplet (given the couplet was never used in Italy or by
Petrarch).

The change in both rhyme pattern and subject matter takes place by the creation of two distinct
stanzas (the octave and the sestet). The change in rhyme and subject happen at the volta, the
ninth line of the poem (the first line of the second stanza).

The Shakespearean Sonnet, or English Sonnet, is very different from the Petrarchan Sonnet.
While the Shakespearean Sonnet consists of fourteen lines (like the Petrarchan Sonnet), the
lines are divided into stanzas very differently.

This sonnet is composed using three quatrains (three stanzas consisting of four lines each)
and a concluding couplet (a two line stanza). The rhyme scheme of this sonnet is alternating,
throughout the quatrains, and ends in a rhyming couplet.
Therefore, the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean Sonnet is as follows:

abab

cdcd

efef

gg

Both the Petrarchan and Shakespearean Sonnets have a place where the subject changes, but
in the Shakespearean Sonnet it is not called the volta, instead, it is called the turn. The turn
takes place at the same point (line 9) as the Petrarchan Sonnet. Sometimes though, the turn
may not happen until the couplet.

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Spring
Translated by Morris Bishop

Zephyr returns, and scatters everywhere

New flowers and grass, and company does bring,
Procne and Philomel, in sweet despair,
And all the tender colors of the Spring.
Never were fields so glad, nor skies so fair,
And Jove exults in Venus prospering.
Love is in all the water, earth and air,
And love possesses every living thing.

But to me only heavy sights return

For her who carried in her little hand
My heart’s key to her heavenly sojourn,
The birds sing loud above the flowering land;
Ladies are gracious now – where deserts burn
The beasts still prowl on the ungreening sand.

Sonnet XVIII
William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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