Spenserian stanza

n. 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

n (Poetry) prosody the stanza form used by the poet Spenser in his poem The Faerie Queene, consisting of eight lines in iambic pentameter and a concluding Alexandrine, rhyming a b a b b c b c c

Spense′rian stan′za

n. the stanza used by Spenser in his Faerie Queene (1590–96), consisting of eight iambic pentameter lines and a final Alexandrine, with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc. [1810–20]

Thesaurus

Noun

Spenserian stanza - a stanza with eight lines of iambic pentameter and a concluding Alexandrine with the rhyme pattern abab bcbc c; "the Spenserian stanza was introduced by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene"stanza - a fixed number of lines of verse forming a unit of a poem

Spenserian Stanza

a nine-line stanza with the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc; the first eight lines are in iambic pentameter and the last in iambic hexameter. First used by E. Spenser as an epic version of the French lyric stanza ababbcbc in the narrative poem The Faerie Queene (1590–96), it was later revived by Byron in Childe Harold and by Shelley and Keats. The stanza was later used in German and Russian poetry, mainly in translations and stylizations, as in M. Kuzmin’s “The Horseman.” The Spenserian stanza influenced the structure of M. Iu. Lermontov’s 11-line stanza, used in Sashka and “In Memory of A. Odoevskii.”

Spenserian stanza