Stanza Form Research Articles

The Martijn Trilogy Manuscripts: An Open Dataset for Analyzing Scribal Variation

Abstract The authors present a dataset containing transcriptions of manuscripts of the Middle Dutch strophic poem Martijn Trilogy by the Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant. Of his very large oeuvre, Maerlant’s Strophic Poems had the longest tradition: originally written in the thirteenth century, copyists and printers continued to disseminate them until about 1500. These ten shorter poems on social, religious, and ethical issues stand out for their unusual and complex stanza form. The Martijn Trilogy was his most successful strophic poem: 17 text witnesses are extant, and the trilogy was imitated and even translated into French and Latin. This dataset contains hyperdiplomatic transcriptions of all witnesses, amounting to a total of 15,814 verses or 79,337 tokens. This open-access dataset abides by the fair principles, is licensed under a cc-by-sa license, and is made available in multiple, complementary file formats. Since these transcriptions are strictly diplomatic, this corpus offers valuable possibilities for research on scribal attributions (scribal profiling), abbreviations, stemmatology, textual stability and more.

Philip Larkin and the Stanza

Philip Larkin, one of England’s finest poets among the generation that came of age during World War II, maintained a strong interests in the formal features of verse throughout his career. This article marks the first comprehensive overview of his highly varied and frequently original use of one such feature, the stanza. A set of tables provides overall data about the relative frequency of different stanza lengths – in his four published poetry collections, in poems that he either published or planned to publish but did not appear in one of those collections, and in the unpublished verse. He turns out to have been a strikingly innovative master of stanza form. If many poets rely heavily on the quatrain as their favored stanza, Larkin makes that only one of several stanza lengths that he turns to regularly. More importantly, he composes stanzas in innovative and imaginative ways. His forty sonnets – only eight of which appeared in his four collections – reveal a variety of rhyme schemes and, occasionally, unusual placement of the breaks between portions of the sonnet. In other poems, the rhyme schemes are often irregular, making the rhyme scheme difficult to detect, particularly in those cases when he employs highly approximate rhyme. Much of his verse is also marked by frequent enjambement, even between stanzas. He occasionally links his stanzas and sometimes creates a rhyme scheme that has a different number of lines than the actual stanza length, resulting in markedly complex compositions. In all, Larkin regularly uses his stanzas to highlights key aspects of a poem’s meaning, while the intricacy of many stanza structures forces his readers to consider poems more intently.

Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama

Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama

Becoming braver through stanza format: Exploring intersecting identities beyond autistic

In this article, I reflect on my professional journey in multiple contexts, in particular when working with autism was new territory for me. I found it more ethical and easier to express complexity through stanza form. I convey the therapeutic journey of in particular two young people I have worked with, and I highlight other themes that I have come across, using generalised case examples. I highlight issues of intersectionality, particularly around gender identity, sexuality, culture and racialised identities. Throughout I relay how I work in an ethical way, opening space to promote intersectional expressions in complexity. I reflect on how finding my stanza voice has helped me express complexities more effectively than in prose, using stanzas.

Telling the Truth: Fictionality and Epic in Seventeenth-Century German Literature

AbstractResearch on the history of fiction of the early modern period has up to now taken primarily the novel into consideration and paralleled the rise of the novel as the leading genre of narrative literature with the development of the modern consciousness of fictionality. In the present essay, we argue that contemporary reflections on fictionality in epic poetry, specifically, thecarmen heroicum, must be taken into account to better understand the history of fiction from the seventeenth century onwards. Thecarmen heroicum, in the seventeenth century, is the leading narrative genre of contemporary poetics and as such often commented on in contexts involving questions of fictionality and the relationship between literature and truth, both in poetic treatises and in the poems themselves. To reconstruct a historical understanding of fictionality, the genre of the epic poem must therefore be taken into account.Thecarmen heroicumwas the central narrative genre in antiquity, in the sixteenth century in Italy and France, and still in the seventeenth century in Germany and England. Martin Opitz, in his ground-breaking poetic treatise, theBuch von der Deutschen Poeterey(1624), counts thecarmen heroicumamong the most important poetic genres; but for poetry written in German, he cites just one example of the genre, a text he wrote himself. The genre of the novel is not mentioned at all among the poetic genres in Opitz’ treatise. Many other German poetic treatises of the seventeenth century mention the importance of thecarmen heroicum, but they, too, provide only few examples of the genre, even though there were many Latin and German-language epic poems in the long seventeenth century. For Opitz, acarmen heroicumhas to be distinguished from a work of history insofar as its author is allowed to add fictional embellishments to the ›true core‹ of the poem. Nevertheless, the epic poet is, according to Opitz, still bound to the truthfulness of his narrative.Shortly before the publication of Opitz’ book, Diederich von dem Werder translated Torquato Tasso’s epic poemGerusalemme liberata(1580); his translation uses alexandrine verse, which had recently become widely successful in Germany, especially for epic poems. Von dem Werder exactly reproduces Tasso’s rhyming scheme and stanza form. He also supplies the text with several peritexts. In a preface, he assures the reader that, despite the description of unusual martial events and supernatural beings, his text can be considered poetry. In a historiographical introduction, he then describes the course of the First Crusade; however, he does not elaborate about the plot of the verse epic. In a preceding epyllion – also written in alexandrine verse – von dem Werder then poetically demonstrates how the poetry of a Christian poet differs from ancient models. All these efforts can be seen as parts of the attempt to legitimate the translation of fictional narrative in German poetry and poetics. Opitz and von dem Werder independently describe problems of contemporary literature in the 1620s using the example of thecarmen heroicum. Both authors translate novels into German, too; but there are no poetological considerations in the prefaces of the novels that can be compared to those in thecarmina heroica.Poetics following the model established by Opitz develop genre systems in which thecarmen heroicumis given an important place, too; for example, in Balthasar Kindermann’sDer Deutsche Poet(1664), Sigmund von Birken’sTeutsche Rede- bind- und Dicht-Kunst(1679), and Daniel Georg Morhof’sUnterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie(1682). Of particular interest for the history of fictionality is Albrecht Christian Rotth’sVollständige Deutsche Poesie(1688). When elaborating on thecarmen heroicum, Rotth gives the word ›fiction‹ a positive terminological value and he treats questions of fictionality extensively. Rotth combines two contradictory statements, namely that acarmen heroicumis a poem and therefore invented and that acarmen heroicumcontains important truths and is therefore true. He further develops the idea of the ›truthful core‹ around which poetic inventions are laid. With an extended exegesis of Homer’sOdyssey, he then illustrates what it means precisely to separate the ›core‹ and the poetic embellishments in a poem. All these efforts can be seen as parts of the attempt to legitimize a poem that tells the truth in a fictional mode.The paper argues that a history of fictionality must be a history that carefully reconstructs the various and specifically changing constellations of problems concerning how the phenomenon of fictionality may be interpreted in certain historical contexts. Relevant problems to which reflections on fictionality in seventeenth-century poetics of the epic poem and in paratexts to epic poems react are, on the one hand, the question of how the genre traditionally occupying the highest rank in genre taxonomy, the epic, can be adequately transformed in the German language, and, on the other hand, the question of how a poetic text can contain truths even if it is invented.

French film music scoring in the thirties: a stylistic tripartition

ABSTRACT The novelty of talking cinema in the thirties, supported by an artisanal production system that allowed some individual initiatives to be expressed, produced a ferment of ideas in the field of French music scoring as evidenced in the writing of many composers. If Hollywood cinema quickly opted for ubiquitous narrative music, the author will show that French productions were much more varied by focusing on three non-exclusive approaches represented by Arthur Honegger, Alexis Roland-Manuel and Vincent Scotto. The first advocates for an ‘autonomist’ approach where music accompanies the images while also retaining its own structural logic (rondo, fugue, leitmotifs). The second develops a ‘song-writing’ approach in his collaborations with Marcel Pagnol and beyond: diegetic and extra-diegetic songs with short melodies both with and without lyrics (chorus and stanza form, sequential form). The third, finally, favours a more cinematographic conception by detaching himself from pre-conceived forms and composing music that complements the noises and the voices on the soundtrack.

Амебейная композиция в поэзии И.В. Северянина

The article focuses on the peculiarities of the creative use of alternate literary composition (parallelism) in the lyric poetry by I.V. Severyanin and on the influence of this stanza form on song nature of his works. Relying on theoretical propositions, expressed in prosody works of V. M. Zhirmunsky, the author of the article makes a hypothesis about the leading role of stanza form on the formation of individual style of Severyanin, one of the fundamental elements of which is the principle of «theatricalization» of the lyric plot which expands the traditional scope of interaction between the poet and his audience. The most aesthetically important functional features of the types of alternate literary composition such a psychological parallelism, parallelism in form of synonymous variations, antiphonic parallelism are studied on the materials of poetic texts of different years. Special attention is paid to revealing the hidden author’s position, which is expressed in the use of theatre mask of a «royal clown», allowing a complex semantic game with the reader or listener. Such a reading becomes possible only with a detailed analysis of the stanza component.

Oktawa w epice historycznej wieków dawnych – wybrane problemy (na przykładzie Pamiętnego uprowadzenia wojska z cieśni bukowińskiej… Stanisława Wincentego Jabłonowskiego)

The article is divided into two parts. The first one describes a career that ottava rima had in seventeenth-century heroic narrative poems. What the author references are the most valid opinions by scholars of the Polish verse pertaining to ottava rima, in addition to the opinions by the poets who struggled to write in this challenging stanza form. Part two of the article analyses selected stanzas (ottavas) from the narrative poem Pamiętne uprowadzenie wojska z cieśni bukowińskiej… (1745) by Stanisław Wincenty Jabłonowski. Aside from versological questions, also the most important problems are indicated that relate to editing and punctuation of the Jabłonowski’s ottava rima.

KEMAN, PİYANO VE VİYOLONSEL “INO-2” İÇİN BİR ROTARU ÜÇLÜ NEO-FOLKLOR TARZI

The piano Trio, the study of which is part of the dissertation research:” The features of the performance of the piano part in a cycle of three piano Trio “INO”, is discussed in this article. The piano Trio, its meaning in the work of the author, the main stylistic, harmonic and rhythmic aspects are analyzed in this article. The connection with the neo-folklore trend in music and traditional genres in Moldavian folk music, the synthesis of traditional folklore with modern compositional techniques are revealed. This article is intended to determine primarily the style features of this composition. It is aimed at analyzing the characteristic features of the neo-folklore direction, which is a paramount importance in composer’s creativity. The Trio “INO-2” was created by the composer in 2004 based on the material of “Sonata for violin and piano”, dedicated to daughter Elizabeth. The Trio consists of two parts unequal in volume, Recitativ and Allegro scherzando. The second part is the dramatic and dynamic center of the work, the first performs a kind of prologue to it. The neo-folklorism style manifests itself in both parts of the trio. In the first part lexemes of folk genres of doina and ballads are found. This can be seen in the stanza form (5 stanza + Coda), in the rhythm rich in melismatics, in variation intonational tunes. The modern technique of compositional writing is manifested in the appeal to the untacted rhythmic system characteristic of modern music of the late 20th and early 21st centures. The neo-folkloric style of the second part is accented by V. Rotaru in a generalized imitation of folkloric male dances, the clear sign of which is asymmetric and unequal rhythm. It includes a sequence of seven eights, two eights, six eights, four eights. Also manifests itself in the characteristics formula of a bass chord or in virtuosic passages sixteenth. The author’s appeal to imitation of a cymbal texture, which is most often performed in the piano part, should also be noted. The style of neo-folklorism in this composition harmoniously combines with both classical ensemble texture and innovative techniques of writing technique. In both cases, a variety of polyphonic techniques for combining piano and string instruments is playing an important role. “INO-2” received well-deserved recognition in the interpretation of professional performers – Inna Saulova, Nadezhda Kozlova and Olga Uhno – to whom it is dedicated. Trio “INO-2” is a bright composition with imaginative contrasts, demanded in concert and teaching practice in Moldova and abroad. In the article, in the context of development, the neo-folklore direction, which is one of the most bright style trends in Russian music of the second part of the 20th century, is studied.

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

Order and Disorder in the Ottava Rima of Shelley and Byron

ANY GIVEN FORM presents a writer not with a certain type of poem, but with a field of possibility. The possibilities of ottava rima, the stanza rhyming abababcc, are many. For a start, the interlocking intricacy of the sestet could be deployed as vacillation, or oscillation, or even merely the reinforcement of a rhyme-sound. The sestet produces a sense that the poet could go on rhyming forever, particularly when the confident clinch of the couplet arrives, as if to say, ‘Everything skilful must end; there are other things to think about’. The stanza produces, in the words of Jeffrey C. Robinson, ‘a poetry of playful, outrageous reversals, deconstructions, and juxtapositions perfect for comic but also for transformative poetry’.1 Presented with ottava rima’s interesting aural conflation of interlocking intricacy in the sestet and noticeably distinct resolution in the couplet, Byron and Shelley went separate ways. Nevertheless, formal similarity influenced content: the common denominator of The Witch of Atlas and Don Juan is a fascination with flexibility, expressed in the former as an affinity for intricacy, a kind of ordering spirit, and in the latter as an embracing of change and disorder. One of Byron’s chosen metaphors for Don Juan, ‘A versified Aurora Borealis’ (CPW v. 337), chimes tellingly with Shelley’s description, in The Witch of Atlas, of a ‘stubborn centre’ which must disperse to become ‘a cloud of summer dust’ (Poems, iii. 584):2 both of these natural images evoke the intricate concision of the ottava rima stanza, expressing pleasing variation in short compass. The tussle of the ordering and the disordering spirit is explored by the stanza’s distinctive rhyme scheme: the fluctuations of the sestet might be seen as being brought to order by the couplet (as in the overarching spirit of Shelley’s deployments), or the couplet might be read as a vain or vainglorious attempt to rescue a little order from the proliferating turmoil of the sestet (as in Byron’s most characteristic usages). The stanza form’s aural effects work as a conduit for, in Walter Pater’s succinct word in the essay on ‘Style’, a ‘brain-wave’ – a term that Angela Leighton elaborates as a ‘cross between a sound-wave and an idea’.3 The ottava-rimic cadence, like any formal cadence, challenges the poet to tessellate a lexis and a set of concepts to fulfil its auditory expectation: form, as Peter McDonald writes, ‘is the pressing reality according to which metaphors and meaning must make their way’.4

THE EFFECT OF CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH IN TEACHING SHORT STORIES AND POEMS TO THE ENGLISH PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS

INTRODUCTION:Education is at the heart of human life, therefore peoples from all walks of life aim for a quality education. One has to equip himself or herself with the right skills to face the adversities of life. However, according to Lasaten (2008) most teachers are not willing to try out new approaches in teaching because they are already confined to traditional approaches. As a result, many learners find difficulty in understanding important concepts because most schools do not adequately provide the requisite experiences for learners to fully develop their skills and potentials (Lasaten, 2008).Jonassen, Peck, and Wilson (1999) stated in their study on constructivism that many teachers have a strong desire for students to be active participants in their own learning. These teachers do not want students to listen passively as they are told what they need to learn. Students who are actively engaged in learning become more involved as they discover and make sense of their world.Interestingly, literature is the source for the students to learn worthwhile values and skills necessary for their existence. Hence, teaching literature needs a careful plan for instruction to fully develop the potentials of the students (Lasaten, 2008).Specifically, short stories and poems, being a literary genre, can make its r eaders see life in a wider perspective. Their realistic presentation of life's situations and characters can hurl learners into another world or another period; it can create an emotional situation, a mood or tone, a feeling that can make them experience t he SHESignificant Human Experience (Baraceros, 2005). The appreciation of a short story and poems will greatly increase as one understands the tools, which an author uses in telling one. These tools include the elements of a story namely: setting, characters, plot, point of view and theme respectively and the elements of poetry such as: rhythm, rhyme, figures of speech, stanza form, symbols, subject matter, theme, persona and mood. Short stories and poems therefore, are means of communicating creative exp eriences (Villanueva, 2012).Considering these, teachers of literature who are teaching short stories and poems, are confined to the traditional method and approaches of teaching, resembling a one-person show with a captive but comatose audience (Lasaten, 2008).In a research conducted by Bolosan, Bumanglag, Norono, Pascua and Villanueva (2010) about classroom interaction in the teaching of short stories, they found out, that in a traditional classroom setting, the teachers seem to be the only fountain of knowledge in the class, making the students passive and seldom engage in group activities and decision making. Moreover, only few students respond to questions raised by their teachers and classmates. Some others do not even share their understanding of t he short stories and poems they read.The Constructivist Approach advocates social or classroom interaction, wher ein students are given the opportunity to interact with their teacher, other students and the material they read. According to Bruner (1986), students construct their own knowledge, relating their previous knowledge through social interaction. Moreover, Lasaten (2008) contends that meaningful learning takes place through social interaction that is, knowledge is constructed as more knowledgeable when one interact with others and share their expertise. Thus, to learn is to experience, that is to interact with one's environment; to do, to feel, to sense, to handle and to perceive the opportunities. Certainly, students benefit from social interaction by (1) sharing ideas, (2) appropriating understanding, and (3) articulating thinking.With the Constructivist Approach, students are transformed from being passive recipients of information to active participants in the learning process. Furthermore, the students construct their knowledge actively rather than just mechanically ingesting ideas from the literary texts, from the teacher or from the textbook. …

Charlotte Brontë’s Poetics: A Study of ‘Pilate’s Wife’s Dream’

Charlotte Brontë’s poetry has often been dismissed as inferior to her sisters’ and uninteresting in its own right. Using her poem ‘Pilate’s Wife’s Dream’ as a representative example, this article will illustrate some of Charlotte’s strengths and weaknesses as a poet. In this poem, the strengths include her use of end-rhyme, rhetorical devices (particularly personification) and characterization as a part of her boldly creative expansion of a few biblical verses; among its weaknesses are her unimaginative use of the stanza form, her prosaic syntax and her pedestrian metre. Despite these shortcomings, ‘Pilate’s Wife’s Dream’ has great literary merit, indicating that Charlotte Brontë’s poetry is worthy of further critical attention.

Speech Lessons

74 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews has been instrumental in shaping a poetic style of uncommon lucidity, a voice that speaks directly and with philosophical force. Gilbert is a juggler of contradictions , delighting in their strangeness the speaker of his poems is continually invigorated rather than daunted by the paradoxes of life; deprivation and loneliness may come but are seen as ultimately fruitful. In “How Much of That Is Left in Me?,” the poet reflects on the productive tension that emerges from the dual states of yearning and celebration, contentment and discontent, concluding, “What fine provender in the want. / What freshness in me amid the loneliness.” He is someone who relishes transitions: he doesn’t fear change but embraces it. In “What to Want,” a man feels the potential for growth in a sudden series of shifts in his life: “The budding / amid the random passion. . . . What interested him / most was who he was about to become.” Although Gilbert eludes classification , there is an argument for seeing him as a romantic. The women in his life hold a central place in these poems, yet his passion for them and the pain he feels over losing them are never expressed sentimentally. Instead , they are meditatively revisited, often through metaphors of music or dance, as in “After Love”—“He is watching the music with his eyes closed. / Hearing the piano like a man moving / through the woods thinking by feeling ,” or in “Waiting and Finding”: “Meaning love sometimes dying out, / sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives / silent in the middle of the world’s music.” Despite his impulse to savor life’s richness and to bring pleasure and suffering into balance, Gilbert ’s speaker is also vigilant, quietly braced by the awareness of mortality, described in one poem as “a cello inside him.” His speaker watches himself , the foreign landscapes through which he travels, the gestures and moods of beloved women, and the inevitable aging of the body with a cool, mesmerized absorption. In “Meanwhile,” the speaker muses on the constant state of suspension felt between life and death: “For nine years in me it has waited. / My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing / and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.” Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey John Montague. Speech Lessons. Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2012. isbn 9781930630598 Speech Lessons exhibits all the lyrical grace of John Montague’s previous volumes without ever slipping into easy nostalgia. His poems of memory do not simply look backward into a personal past but are woven into the fabric of history and, sometimes , mindful of what is to come (the volume ends with “the future, already whirling past”). Although he is known for his evocations of childhood , of family and community, and of Ireland’s difficult twentieth-century history, these themes inform one another so that we view the personal through the communal, and the singular self is poignantly present but never egotistical or self-enclosed. This is what gives Montague’s work its broad scope. He is known as a stylist, and rightly so. Speech Lessons exhibits Montague’s care for the stanza form: each poem has its own stanzaic form, which is often disrupted to great effect, as when the poem suddenly offers a surprising final impression , a change of speaker, or unforeseen burst of feeling. Montague is a master of measure and melody, establishing regular cadences and irregular but noticeable patterns of rhymes: harmonies are often formed by echoes across lines and across Benjamin Stein The Canvas Brian Zumhagen, tr. Open Letter Jan Wechsler discovers gaps in his own memory when he finds a book in his suitcase, and Amnon Zichroni believes he has the gift of experiencing other people’s memories. The protagonists’ lives are intertwined through the controversial “Holocaust Memoir” of Minsky. Both sides meet in the middle of this captivating novel, where two versions of the same story are told on different sides of the book. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Apricot Jam and Other Stories Kenneth Lantz & Stephen Solzhenitsyn, tr. Counterpoint Noble Prize–winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s final work is a collection of nine short stories...

RALPH HANNA (ed.), The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane. From materials collected by the late W. R. J. Barron.

THIS is the first full critical edition of the remarkably fine alliterative poem Golagros and Gawane, surviving in a single witness from an early edition by Chepman and Myllar, printed in Edinburgh in 1508. The copy is bound into a booklet, today National Library of Scotland, Advocates Library 19.1.16, together with ten other short printed books produced by the same press. The poem is characterized by its difficult language and complex metrical structure, organized in thirteen-line stanzas, composed of nine alliterating long lines followed by a ‘wheel’ of four short lines, and has remained one of the most challenging alliterative works for editors and readers alike. With Ralph Hanna, working from the notes of the Late W. R. J. Barron, the poem has found an editor to match its sophistication. Hanna is an expert in all things alliterative, and can illuminate this difficult poem with his previous experience as an editor of alliterative works, such as the Siege of Jerusalem or The Awntyrs off Arthure, the latter sharing Golagros’ thirteen-line stanza form.

'An Ende of an Olde Song': Middle English Lyric and the Skeltonic*

Although John Skelton has recently been the subject of renewed critical interest, this attention has not extended to the verse form to which he gave his name: the Skeltonic. This article revisits the vexed question of its origins, arguing that there are strong (and previously unremarked) resemblances between the Skeltonic and the Middle English lyric, specifically that form of the lyric which deploys long rhyme leashes within a containing stanza form. The article compares Skelton's own lyrics with his Skeltonics, and both with the lyrics of BL MS Additional 5465, a manuscript with which Skelton is closely associated. Having demonstrated that all three share a number of formal features, it then traces a persistent lyric influence in a number of Skelton's later works, focusing in particular on what is apparently one of his most unruly poems, Why Come Ye Nat to Court? Finally, it argues that the form of a number of poems of the later sixteenth century (notably William Barnes’ ‘Treatyse answerynge the boke of Berdes’ and the anonymous The Passyon of the Fantasy of the Foxe) reveals that Skelton's immediate successors viewed lyric and Skeltonic as closely related. Thus, although the Skeltonic remains a highly idiosyncratic verse form, the article demonstrates that it is more closely linked to the development of mainstream English poetry than has generally been suggested.

Kancona u pjesništvu Saba Bobaljevića Glušca

Dubrovački renesansni pjesnik Sabo Bobaljević Glušac (1529. ili početak 1530. - 1585.) u članku je predstavljen trima različitim oblicima talijanske kancone: Petrarkina kancona, kancona-oda, sestina (sestina lirica). Petrarkina je kancona prezentirana trima primjerima koji se razlikuju brojem stanca u kanconama (8, 5,7), brojem stihova u stancama (20, 13, 6), brojem stihova u "kondžedu" (9, 3, 3) i drugim osobitostima. Kancona-oda je nazočna u dvama primjerima stihova koji su organizirani u katrene, od 4 i 3 četverostiha, dok se forma sestine nalazi samo ujednoj pjesmi. Osobine starije talijanske kancone obilježavaju sve te forme: liričnost, strofičnost, silabički obrazac, a što se tiče stihova upotrijebljeni su jedanaesterac i sedmerac. Strofa kancone (provansalski cobla, pl. coblas), tzv. stanca, određenaje prema načelu jednakosti, osim "kondžeda" (oproštaja), koji je izboran s karakteristikom jezgrovitosti, a u talijanskoj se teoriji stiha još pojavljuju i termini invio, provansalski tornada. Petrarkina je kancona složena od "pjedi" i "sirme", piedi su djeljive jer je moguća podjela stihova na dva ili više dijelova koji imaju istisilabički obrazac i istu shemu rima, dok je struktura "sirme" teoretski slobodna, upotrijebljena je različita mogućnost kombinacija stihova i rima. Kancona-oda i sestina lirica složene su od strofa koje su unutar sebe nedjeljive, ali su kitice između sebe sumjerljive prema broju stihova, istome tipu stiha, njihovu rasporedu te shemirima, međutim, na završetcima se stihova u sestini ne događa rima, nego se riječi iz prve kitice ponavljaju, koje kruže iz strofe u strofu, a tu formu karakterizira sastav od 6 kitica, po 6 stihova i jedan dodatak od 3 stiha. Te se pjesme sadržajimai oblicima, topikom i duhom temelje na petrarkističkim elementima; osnovna ideja i glavna tema tih pjesama jest ljubav, koja je tu nazočna kroz petrarkističko poimanje ljubavi, dok se jedna kancona dotiče vremenitosti zemnih aspiracija, kojima suprotstavlja veličanje i trajnost stvaralaštva. Čuvstva se lirskoga subjekta u kontrastnim raspoloženjima izmjenjuju kroz nadahnuti lirski govor, a eksponira sezaljubljenik patnik, koji je uništen pred idealom svoje gospoje prispodobive nimfi i božici. Plavokosi je petrarkistički ideal gospoje prezentiran konvencionalnom petrarkističkom frazeologijom (žena je oličenje duhovne i fizičke ljepote, i vrline je krase uz ljepotu) a uglavnom se manifestira kroz slikoviti poetski govor, najčešćekroz figuru metafore, koju prate alegorija te simbolika, koje su karakteristične Bobaljevićevu izrazu, uz figuru antiteze. Motivi koji dominiraju u kanconama su: isticanje i hvaljenje ženske fizičke i duhovne ljepote, ljubavno jadanje, izrazito naglašavanje patnje, pomisao na smrt, opsjednutost ljubavlju, očaj i nada koji seučestalo pojavljuju kao pratnja doživljaju ljubavi i dr.

Scottish Poets and English Stanzas: Schir Thomas Norny and Dunbar’s Use of Tail-Rhyme

It is a tradition almost amounting to a rule for literary critics to praise the late medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar for his great variety and mastery of poetic technique. In terms of his exploration of stanzaic patterns, however, Dunbar is relatively conservative. In his shorter poems, he has a discernible preference for rhymed stanzas of four or five lines, usually made up of the four- or five-stress lines most prevalent in fifteenth-century English and Scottish poetry. He does not invent new metrical schemes nor does he use an especially large range of them, considering the number of poems he wrote. He does, however, show an unusual flair for marrying form and sense. W. H. Auden comments admiringly, “He knows exactly the kind of verse which will suit any given subject, exactly what can be got out of a metre or a stanza form.”.

The Prosody of the Middle Scots Alliterative Poems

The importance of the alliterative line as a staple of Middle Scots poetry has long been recognized, and the essential characteristics of the thirteen-line stanza form favoured by Scottish poets have often been described. In her 1975 landmark study “The Alliterative Tradition in Middle Scots Verse,” a doctoral dissertation which is still by far the most comprehensive account of the structural features of the verse form, Margaret Mackay lists the poems which utilize this stanza: besides three substantial poems of major literary and historical importance, The Buke of the Howlat, Rauf Coilyear, and Golagros and Gawane, the list includes Sum Practysis of Medecyne by Henryson and the Prologue to the Eighth Book of Douglas’s Eneados, the anonymous Gyre-Carling, Montgomerie’s Ane anser to ane heland manis Invectiue and contributions by both antagonists to the Invectiues Capitane Allexander Montgomeree and Pollvart (The Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart), and a short meditation by John Stewart of Baldynneis. She also cites two instances of a verse form identical except that the ninth line is short instead of long — The Ballat of Kynd Kittok and Lyndsay's unique use of the stanza for Diligence’s opening speech in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis — and a few other poems which also utilize the alliterative long line though in different stanzaic arrangements. In his seminal work on the history of alliterative poetry in English, Thorlac Turville-Petre notes that “from the end of the fifteenth century the thirteen-line alliterative stanza was only used for ribaldry and satire” (though the Lyndsay and Stewart instances are exceptions to this), and James VI in his Reulis and Cautelis prescribes it specifically for “flyting or Inuectiues.” Yet the remarkable fact is surely not that the form had by then come to be restricted in its use but that it had survived at all: even at the highly sophisticated court of James VI, whose poets prided themselves on being at the cutting edge of European literary movements, this old warhorse retained its popularity. Contrasting with the enduring importance, in Scotland, of alliterative stanzaic verse is the scarcity of poems in continuous unrhymed alliterative verse, a form which flourished in England: Scotland has, of course, only one major example of the latter, which can be seen as bringing the history of that ancient poetic form to a spectacular conclusion, namely, Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo.

Chaosmos: Observations on the Stanza Form of Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero

Recent critical observations on Akhmatova's Poema bez geroia (Poem Without a Hero) are drawn together, suggesting that it detaches itself from modernism and moves beyond it in various ways. These ideas are then extended in relation to the poem's innovative stanza form. It is argued that Poem represents a conscious attempt to revive the formalism and spirit of experimentation that was characteristic of the Silver Age. Akhmatova both demonstrates and celebrates modernist poetics, but ultimately exceeds modernism by establishing a new poetical system which regards modernism with considerable irony. The unusual stanza constitutes an important part of this dual desire both to revive, and to establish a distance from, Silver Age modernism. The stanza manifests a peculiar capacity for variation and frequently departs from its basic structure, so that previous descriptions of Akhmatova's stanza in scholarship discern both regularity and a capricious elasticity. This paradoxical combination of order with unpredictability suggests that the stanza might usefully be characterized — employing scientific discourse as a metaphor — as a kind of chaotic system. It furnishes Akhmatova with a means of establishing a dialogue with chaos at the level of prosody which constitutes a formal expression of the theme of disintegration and chaos which is central to the poem.