Poetry Guide: Stanza
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In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. The term means "room" in Italian.
A stanza may have a self-contained rhyme scheme or be made up of a fixed number of lines (see distich/couplet, tercet, quatrain, cinquain/quintain, sestet) or, as in much modern poetry, may be an arbitrary unit defined by publishing conventions such as white space or punctuation.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 can be broken into stanzas:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds |\ Admit impediments. Love is not love | \ Which alters when it alteration finds, | / All one stanza Or bends with the remover to remove. |/
O no, it is an ever fixed mark |\ That looks on tempests and is never shaken; | \ It is the star to every wand'ring barque, | / All one stanza Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken. |/
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks |\ Within his bending sickle's compass come; | \ Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, | / All one stanza But bears it out even to the edge of doom. |/
If this be error and upon me proved,|\ I never writ, nor no man ever loved.|/ All one stanza
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