To illustrate the narrative affordances of the
Spenserian stanza, I have isolated a sequence of six stanzas from Book 3, canto 1 (stanzas 14-19; see Appendix 1) that constitute a compact narrative episode comprising several tightly integrated events.
The dream vision structure of Shelley's Queen Mob and Byron's use of
Spenserian stanzas in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage also stand behind The Purgatory of Suicides, as Cooper acknowledges in his Life, pp.
The
Spenserian stanza is flexible enough to sustain the various moods and strategies of an imaginatively told, highly ornamented narration.
The verse form, the
Spenserian stanza, is an ingenious modification of the rhyme royal stanza, in which the last line breaks the decasyllabic monotony with a rhythmically flexible Alexandrine.
This example of Byron's
Spenserian stanza is typical in his suppression of the middle couplet and in his climactic use of the final hexameter.
A second edition "with divers other poems" (1648) included his version of the fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid, in
Spenserian stanza. His Selected Parts of Horace appeared in 1652.
Spenserian stanza A stanza that consists of eight lines of iambic pentameter (five feet) followed by a ninth line of iambic hexameter (six feet), known as an alexandrine; the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.
, the
Spenserian stanza or the In Memoriam stanza, popularized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the poem by that title.
The
Spenserian stanzas follow a protagonist's journey through Europe as it reeled from the cruel toll of revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
At first, in canto 1, Childe Harold's narrating poet holds the well-born being he's set up as the poem's title character at ironic distance, an effect made plain by the artificial antiquarianism of the earliest
Spenserian stanzas:
Wet night turf spread below the window like thick untranslated
Spenserian stanzas describing fairy glens.