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The Spenserian Stanza
For The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596, 1609) Spenser devised a stanza form to accommodate the wide and demanding range of his allegorical and narrative needs. Capable of brisk, page-turning pace, of digressive, even static visual description, of comedy and gravity, of philosophical speculation and wry Ovidian fable, the stanza of The Faerie Queene has proved itself one of the most versatile and yet powerful verse forms in the English language, across hundreds of years. Many later poets have worked in its iambic mold, from early Spenserian imitators like the brothers Giles and Phineas Fletcher, to the Romantic poets Lord Byron and John Keats. The form of the stanza is fairly simple: nine iambic lines rhyming ababbcbcc, the first eight pentameters and the final, ninth line a hexameter - or, as the French poets of the sixteenth century knew it, an alexandrin. The tight interweaving of rhymes is reminiscent of Dante's interlocking terza rima (nine lines of which would rhyme ababcbcdc), and owes an obvious debt to Chaucer's rhyme royal (seven-line stanzas rhyming ababbcc), a form which Spenser used for his Fowre Hymns (1595). In the addition of two extra lines and the innovation of the alexandrin, Spenser's stanza both enlarges Chaucer's stately form - adapting it to epic matter - and provides, in the final line, scope for gravity and the occasional narrative punch. The central hinge of the rhyme, in the bb couplet, gives a strong sense of formal integrity to the stanza, while at the same time (paradoxically) affording an obvious place for within-stanza divisions. Spenser's stanza is innovative: narrative poetry in English had to date usually been written in couplets (Chaucer, Marlowe), in poulters' measure (Gascoigne), or in fourteeners (Golding's Ovid, Chapman's Homer), while Surrey had pioneered the iambic blank verse that would power the dramatic poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare. But it is also conservative: Spenser could cite close stanzaic precedents in Chaucer (particularly in the Monk's Tale, which used an eight-line stanza rhyming ababbcbc), and in the Italian poets Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, whose ottava rima took the form abababcc. Spenser's stanza borrows something from everywhere: the gravity and the bb hinge of rhyme royal, the lightness of touch in the ottava rima, the sense of interweaving so characteristic of Dante, the jilty gear-shift (in the final alexandrin) now so derided in poulters' measure, and two possible locations in the stanza (lines 4-5 and 8-9) for sententious couplets. The diversity of material contained in The Faerie Queene attests to the stanza's versatility. Its suitability to dramatic narrative is clear from, for example, the breathless account of the fight between the Redcrosse knight and the dragon in Book I, canto xi, stanzas 15-21:
As the knight and the dragon once more close upon one another, the reader practically pants with them: long lines, unrelenting parataxis, and a barrage of palatal, fricative, and aspirated consonants will put foam in the mouth of even the silent reader. Spenser builds pace here through repeated words ('pas', 'passed', 'passing'; 'puissant'; 'perce', 'imperceable', 'percing'; 'force', 'forcibly') and through heavy use of alliteration ('often bounding on the brused gras', 'prou'd the powre of many a puissant knight', 'wauing wings displayed wyde', 'gryping grosse'); but in order to bridge the gap between stanzas, and to make them flow one into the other with an irrepressible current, he resorts to more sophisticated rhetorical ploys. For example, Spenser twice deploys anadiplosis in this passage to help accumulate momentum. At the end of stanza 16, the dragon swipes at Redcrosse, 'that horse and man to ground did rush', but immediately 'both horse and man vp lightly rose'; a few stanzas further on, this 'horse and man' is echoed again as the dragon lifts the knight and his mount up into the air. The anadiplosis created by the opening of stanza 21, 'he cryde', again creates a rolling effect between stanzas that ratchets up the pace. Similarly, the ambiguity of reference throughout this passage-the pronoun 'he' standing awkwardly in different places for both dragon and knight-simulates the tumbling and topsy-turvy battle that the passage describes: the identity of the relevant antecedents only come properly into focus for a fleeting moment, as the language then shifts on, rapidly, to the next subject. Even the extended epic simile Spenser uses ('As hagard hauke...', stanza 19) to describe the dragon's seizure of Redcrosse and his horse-a device that could possibly check the dramatic flow of a narrative passage like this-serves rather to increase the forward velocity: the brief interlude of the flight, like the brief interlude of the simile itself, hits the ground running in stanza 20, as 'the knight his thrillant speare againe assayd...' We here see Spenser demonstrating, with great virtuosity, the capacity of his stanza form for thrilling narrative exposition. By careful use of rhetorical figures of repetition, alliteration, assonance, anadiplosis, and simile, he has taken a series of discrete individual stanzas and eroded their boundaries, crafting them into quick-fire quanta of poetical energy that flow, indistinguishably, one into the other. But the Spenserian stanza has a considerable capacity, too, for formal description and emblematic visualization, as in the famous description of the torment of Amoret in the House of Busirane, Book III, canto xii, stanzas 19-21:
As always in Spenser's emblematic pageants - this image of Busirane's torture of the virgin Amoret appears in the middle of the 'Masque of Cupid', a pageant of symbolic figures witnessed by the knight of Chastity, Britomart - Spenser deftly plays off a static visual emblem against the linear movement of the procession. The three-stanza section quoted here begins and concludes with the 'grysie villeins' Despight and Cruelty, who 'lead' her to march at the opening, and 'constraine' her to carry on, 'forward still', at the closing. Sandwiched between these villains, and the movement to which they force her, the description of Amoret's symbolic plight occupies a static visual position at the center of the representation, taking up nearly exactly half (i.e. thirteen) of the twenty-seven lines that comprise her part of the pageant. Spenser uses a number of rhetorical techniques to slow down the motion of the pageant, and almost bring it to a stop, at the center of this passage. Most obviously, the three main verbs of this part of the description are all presented in the passive mode ('was despoyled', 'was...seene', 'was drawne'), while the rest of the verbal ideas - 'entrenched', 'bleeding', 'dyde', 'trembling, 'layd', 'transfixed', 'steeming', and 'embayd' - stand adjectivally in a sometimes ambiguous relation to the verbs governing the description; it is as if the motion in these verbal concepts were being leached out, like the blood from Amoret's heart, leaving them as static qualities. Two uses of parenthesis ('O ruefull sight' and 'The worke of cruell hand') break up the passage typographically, but also disrupt the consistency of its voice, as they represent the interjections of the narrator in a 'personal' register distinct from that of the description. The syntactical structure of stanzas 20 and 21, similarly, breaks up the flow of the description into enervating and dissipating rivulets of meaning. For example, the first four lines of stanza 20 say simply that Amoret's breast was naked, a thought which, though already fully realized in the first four words ('her brest all naked'), requires the grammatical completion of 'was despoyled quight'; before the statement is allowed to arrive at this grammatical completion, Spenser drags it through the momentum-sapping detours of a simile ('as net iuory'), a further qualification of that simile ('without adorne of gold or siluer bright'), a lateral reflection on the qualification of that simile ('wherewith the Craftesman wonts it beautify'), and, by an unexpected hyperbaton, the oblique object of the anticipated (passive) verbal action of a foregone spoliation. By the time the reader arrives at the end of this simple idea, she has been tangled up in a conceptual, temporal, and syntactical knot that has disrupted the narrative flow of the pageant (as the pageant itself has disrupted the narrative flow of Britomart's quest), and sapped its forward impetus. The effect of the rhetorically-deft obstructions, diffusions, and confusions of stanza 20 is to leave the reader gasping for the definitive placement of the preposition 'at', which opens stanza 21; but if she thought this would be a simple solution to the dislocations of the previous stanza, the reader was too hasty: Spenser has not left her 'at' a place, but 'at' an 'orifice'. This dislocation only intensifies, and makes retrospective sense of, the positioning of 'a wide wound therein' exactly at the center of stanza 20, and thus exactly at the center of the three-stanza passage containing the description of Amoret (in fact, the adverb 'therein', occupying the third or middle foot of the fifth line, lies at the 'hart' of this passage). The stanzification of this brief description demonstrates Spenser's masterful facility with his chosen form. Where in the earlier example of Redcrosse's battle with the dragon we witnessed the forward velocity and narrative pace afforded by the Spenserian stanza, here we can see, by contrast, the way in which individual stanzas can be packaged and quantized, one by one, to break up that narrative flow and present an enduring, affecting image - 'forward still'. Stanza 19 begins 'After...', placing the ensuing stanzas in a position relative to the preceding descriptions; stanzas 20 and 21 present the vision of Amoret's plight, with that crucial (ultimately dis-) locative preposition, 'at'; and stanza 22 begins, 'Next after...', once again grinding up the gears of the ongoing procession of symbols. The divisions between stanzas, punctuated by the alexandrines, allow Spenser the rhetorical punch of locative prepositions like 'after' and 'at', and the architectural structure that makes meaningful the placement of words like 'therein'. Spenser's stanzaic form lends itself naturally to one of the formal staples of his epic genre, the extended (or epic) simile, allowing him the leisure to draw out and develop a simile with allegorical and psychological precision without forcing or straining the reader's attention. A typical example occurs in Book IV, canto iv, where at stanza 46-48 the disguised Britomart takes up the cause of the Knights of Maidenhead at Satyrane's tournament, besting Artegall, Cambel, and Triamond:
The nine lines of the Spenserian stanza, with its self-contained rhyme scheme and rhythmical integrity, provide the perfect scope for development of a comparison like this, giving Spenser the opportunity to craft a careful series of symbolic connections between Britomart and Artegall, and chastity and justice. Artegall's eventual role as the patron knight of justice will bring him, by repeated and explicit association, into usual a relation with solar imagery; this passage, with Britomart's succor of the Knights of Maidenhead being characterized as the welcome relief of a rainshower after a heat wave, anticipates that connection, and puts herself in opposition (or possibly in a complementary or mitigating relation) to that connection - a system of relations that will be echoed later, when Britomart brings from the Temple of Isis that principle of moderation, or equity, that allows Artegall to complete his quest. But the extended character of the simile also allows Spenser to make further important associations: the 'brute beasts' invoked by the simile recall the victims of the enchantress Acrasia in Book II, whose bestial natures occluded their virtuous humanity; the 'cold shower' that Britomart's warlike chastity gives these hot and exhausted knights provides a sort of comic moral punchline to an allegorical reading of this oxymoronic 'tournament of chastity'. Similarly, Spenser's narrator has repeatedly by this point, in conventional fashion, characterized the onward movement of the narrative, and of the readers following the narrative, as a voyage or journey; the exhausted appetite of the reader for movement in the narrative, when joined to the covetous lust of the knights for the possession of chastity, turns out to take relief from the same moderating influence of Britomart's enchanted spear. Operative in this simile, too, is the contrast of Britomart's 'ouercasting' cloud, 'shrouding' the exposed knights, who like exhausted animals and travellers are desperate for shade; given the usual association in The Faerie Queene of such imagery with the dynamics of Spenser's allegorical thought and practice, this simile can also provoke readings of Spenser's allegorical method - Britomart's disguise, or non-self-disclosure, relieves the Knights of Maidenhead from too much of the plain light of day, in the same way that the veil of allegory might be thought to facilitate - rather than to impede - a vision of truth. Fundamental to this simile is the complementary status of sun and rain, a chthonic mutuality that positions Britomart, and the female, in a universal interdependent relation to the 'stranger' knights, and the male. The richness of Spenser's similes is made possible by the stanzaic form, which provides a container of the right size and boundedness in which to develop such associations, without letting them spill out to confuse or contaminate the narrative movement of the story. (It should be noted that the convenient hinge in the rhyme scheme, as well as the alexandrine, allows Spenser to develop shorter similes when necessary, occupying either the first four lines - abab - or the second five lines - bcbcc.)
The first few stanzas of a canto in The Faerie Queene often present some sort of moral observation connected - whether in earnest or ironically, straightforwardly or ambiguously - to the subsequent allegorical action. In such instances, the stanza form, particularly due to the sententious gravity afforded by the concluding alexandrive, adapts itself well to argument, as here:
In these two stanzas - the first two stanzas of Book VI, canto ii - Spenser offers some reflections on the virtue of courtesy, which he will go on to exemplify (and to undermine, and complicate) in the following history of the squire Tristram. In the first stanza, we see a typical example of the way in which Spenser disposes a simple argument across the stanza form in a rational way: the interrogative takes up the first part (abab) of the stanza, and the answer the second part (bcbcc), with the final alexandrine reserved for an emphatic assertion, in the style of classical sententia, of the importance of courtesy. The way the rhyme-words 'owe' and 'bestow' create a demand, and then supply it, polishes off the argumentative impact of the stanza. The second stanza takes this standard format and plays with it: at first it seems that we will see the same kind of structure repeated, as the first four lines of the stanza (abab) present the case for the 'naturals' at courteous behavior. The next syntactical unit in the stanza, though, does not extend across the full four- or five-line space available to it, but draws up appropriately short at 'cannot attaine' in line 6 - those who are not 'naturals' at courtesy (which as we have just learned means suiting yourself to the situation, or dressing the matter in the appropriate form), in other words, are deficient, no matter how they 'enforce themselues'. After that point, the argument of the stanza seems to fall apart slightly, as Spenser first goes on to assert that whatever you 'incline' to instinctively gives greatest grace (including vice?), before backtracking, in the alexandrine, to acknowledge that 'good thewes, enforst with paine' also deserve some commendation. The stability offered by the alexandrine, with its single and clear message, seems to restore a direct and plain sense to the passage, which had begun to wander after the deficiency of lines 5-8, so that the reader is left with the conviction necessary to support the ensuing illustrative episode, which commences in stanza 3 with, 'That well in courteous Calidore appeares...' But which of the opposed assertions of stanza 2 appears in Calidore? Is courtesy more 'graceful' or 'worthy' when it is natural, or nurtured? Is it better to win praise or grace? Spenser has opened up a problem for intellectual play and moral debate in the allegory of courtesy, rooting this problem in the failure of the argument to 'fit' the stanza form in stanza 2. This kind of significant play between argument and form is made possible by the strong sense of formal/rhetorical structure usual to the stanza, as exemplified in stanza 1. While the most usual division of the Spenserian stanza falls, as in these two stanzas, between the fourth and fifth lines, the ambiguous status of the alexandrine (as either a concluding line integral to the stanza, or a more isolated reflection on, or summation of that stanza) means that the unit can be broken up in a variety of ways. We have already seen how Spenser can exploit the middle, fifth line of the stanza to create a structure turning on a central foot, or word, like 'therein'. Equally, he can create a series of four couplets followed by the final alexandrine (ab ab bc bcc) , or a set of triplets (aba bbc bcc). A typical example of the triplet structure occurs, naturally, in Spenser's presentation of the triplets Priamond, Diamond, and Triamond (IV. ii. 42):
The division of the stanza into four distinctive parts occurs only occasionally, though still successfully, as at IV. x. 51, as part of Scudamour's account of the Temple of Venus:
The clear separation of the first three couplets ('And... And... And...') from the final triplet ('Both... Both... Both...') creates a strong sense of the 'seemely rate' (IV. x. 52) in which Scudamour discovers this 'beuie of fayre damzels' (x. 50), and intensifies the reader's sense of violation - and of moral confusion - when Scudamour breaks into the circle to forcibly 'ravish' Amoret. Once again, Spenser's precision control of the structural possibilities of his stanza form, joined to an alert deployment of rhetorical figures, makes for effective narrative and allegory. More might well be said about Spenser's virtuosity with his trademark stanza form, or about its particular suitability to the temper or mood, the material, and the ambition of The Faerie Queene. Some readers have, for example, contended that the chime of its rhymes, like the rhythm of its lines, make its particular words forgettable; or that the recurrent pairs or patterns of rhyme-words (such as shield/field/weild/yield, or pain/constrain/fain/train) give the poem a distinctive sound-world, and a cycling, recurring motion. Some readers have recognized the comic potential in the stanza form, especially when ornamented with feminine endings; while others have pointed to its suitability to episodic and digressive narratives, to allusions and parentheses, to complaint and prayer. I myself have noted several instances in the poem where the stanza form seems to have simplified Spenser's revision of the poem before committing it to print - the form was not only expressive and versatile, but made the task of writing and editing the manuscript much more straightforward. And it is no secret to students that Spenser's stanza form often makes reading, and studying, the poem a lot simpler - finding a particular passage in The Faerie Queene is usually a much shorter task than locating a similar kind of passage in, say, Paradise Lost. But these remarks, and examples, will go some way toward demonstrating why the Spenserian stanza has justly been celebrated, and often attempted by Spenser's heirs - by turns emblematic and narrative, harishly brisk and tortuously slow, mathematically detailed and visually integral, gravely sententious and impishly comic, lofty and vulgar, deeply philosophical and brutely physical, eternal and ephemeral, the Spenserian stanza can do it all. Andrew Zurcher Queens' College, Cambridge 2006
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