[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I'm reposting this over from Marion's "A Dreamer's Tale" thread at the Deep End, so as to not hijack her topic with a longer discussion:

Kevin: Chaucer and so have no trouble with long strings of couplets. Stanza breaks should mesh with sense breaks,

This is a curious statement and brings us into the argument about whether poetry is a spoken or a written form. If it is continuous, how do you see it as couplets?

And I am fascinated by the second sentence. And I think this thread is the place to discuss this, as it relates to the poem in this thread. I had a taste of Chaucer,not a whole meal, and frankly, I think I feel like most people who do not have the equivalent of graduate training in English literature: I feel like an outsider to the joke, and feel a twinge of resentment.

Be that as it may, I would challenge Kevin to support the statement that stanza breaks should mesh with "sense breaks." I think my own craft would benefit from an understanding of the validity or the fallacy of that theory.

Humbly awaiting feedback,
Roy

Not very "humbly" if you're using words like "challenge," "fallacy" and "theory."

But, to explain, first, it's not a "theory" -- it's a literary convention and fact. There are exceptions to the rule, but those are exceptions, not invalidations of the rule itself. And the literary conventions go back thousands of years.

But, to explain, the term "couplets" can be confusing because it can refer to one of two things:

1. Two lines rhymed together, but otherwise part of a continuous poem, as with the two final lines of a Spenserian or Shakespearean sonnet, or any of the pairs of rimes in Marion's poem "The Dreamer's Tale" over at the Deep End, or for that matter, most of the Canterbury Tales.

2. An individual stanza composed of two lines, which, in rimed verse, by its nature is a rimed couplet.

With Marion's poem, as with Chaucer's, it's a piece of narrative verse. Since it's very short, it's done as a single stanza made from multiple couplets, the same as a very short story is usually printed as a single paragraph made of multiple sentences.

Basically, you break a stanza where you'd break a paragraph, and you break a canto where you'd break a chapter. Of course, poetry is a tricky beast, and poets like to play tricks with it, so it is possible to have a sentence run over the stanza break, though this is usually only done when there is some natural twist or turn in the sentence and the stanza break can serve to emphasize the transition.

For example, in a sonnet, you have the octave (a stanza of eight lines, in the Shakespearean sonnet rimed ABABCDCD, technically formed from two quatrains) followed by the sestet (a stanza of six lines, which in the Shakespearean sonnet is composed of a quatrain and a couplet, EFEFGG). Many times you'll see poets separate these two stanzas for emphasis of the volta (the logical turn in the subject matter of the sonnet) and on rare occasions you'll even see the concluding couplet set off by itself, but I have never seen the octave set as two separate quatrains because part of the rules of the sonnet is that the first eight lines need to be unified in subject matter, and as such, the stanza needs to be unified as well, not split randomly.

If you look at my Umunum Song over at the Deep End, you've got a poem composed of AABB quatrains. After experiments, I settled on quatrains of fourteeners because of the logical breaks between the subjects of each quatrain, like the breaks in paragraphs in a formal collegiate essay. But as with paragraphs, to a certain extent, where to break them is a matter of the poet or the author's judgement. If a paragraph is particularly long, it's often best to break it into subparagraphs, but you still do that where there are logical turns in the sense, not just wherever you think it will be aesthetically pleasing from a typesetting angle.

The continuous stanzas of a work done all in couplets can be wearying to read for some folk, but read aloud, they sound fine, and if printed in a book, the page breaks, illustrations and occasional typographical ornament (this last inserted at a scene break, if there is one) will generally make it all work properly.

On computers, however, what we look at is a continuous scroll, which can be tiresome, but is no reason to go inserting random breaks into something meant for other print forms.

P.S. It should be noted that Chaucer himself, rather than break the Tales into stanzas, merely indents the text at the start of a new paragraph in the narrative verse, the same as would be done with a page of a modern novel.


[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited March 11, 2005).]