Spenserian stanza

A stanza consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter and a final alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbcc, first used by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene.

Spenserian stanza, an English poetic stanza of nine iambic lines, the first eight being pentameters while the ninth is a longer line known either as an iambic hexameter or as an alexandrine. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. The stanza is named after Edmund Spenser, who invented it—probably on the basis of the ottava rima stanza—for his long allegorical romance The Faerie Queene (1590–6). It was revived successfully by the younger English Romantic poets of the early 19th century: Byron used it for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812, 1816), Keats for ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820), and Shelley for The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Adonais (1821). For the Spenserian sonnet, see sonnet.

A stanza devised by Spenser for The Færie Queene, founded on the Italian ottava rima. It is a stanza of nine iambic lines, all of ten syllables except the last, which is an Alexandrine. There are only three rhymes in a stanza, arranged in a ababbcbcc rhyme scheme.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)