“The Spenserian stanza is… so finely proportioned, and so artfully implicated, that no single rhyme can be withdrawn or appended, nor its station varied, without dissolving the musical effect of the whole,”
- James Montgomery, 1830, Lectures on General Literature, Poetry &c

The Spenserian stanza consists of nine Iambic lines where the first eight are iambic pentameters and the ninth is an iambic hexameter¹; its rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.²

The Spensarian stanza, which should not be confused with the Spensarian sonnet, is “susceptible to a great variety of expression”², and has been called the “finest [form] ever conceived by the soul of music”.³

Examples of the Spenserian Stanza

I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You can not rob me of free Nature’s grace;
You can not shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her bright’ning face;
You can not bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living stream at eve;
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave:
Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave.

- James Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, Canto II, Stanza 3

History

The Spenserian stanza was either invented or first used extensively by Edmund Spencer, a celebrated English Poet. He used the stanza, The Faerie Queene, a long poem known as a “rich store-house of invention”.²

References