What Is a Stanza? Definition, Stanza Names and Examples

A stanza is a group of lines in a poem, set apart from the next group by a blank line. It works like a paragraph in prose: each stanza holds one idea, one picture or one step in the story. So if you are asking "what is a stanza?" while looking at a poem, it is each block of lines between the white spaces. A two-line stanza is a couplet, a three-line stanza is a tercet and a four-line stanza is a quatrain.

What is a stanza in a poem?

Three things mark a stanza in poetry:

• White space. A blank line comes before and after it. An indented line does not start a new stanza; only a gap does.
• Lines that belong together. One scene, one thought or one moment, with the gap signaling a pause or a change.
• Often, a pattern. In traditional poems every stanza repeats the same number of lines, rhythm and rhymes. In free verse, stanzas can change length to mark a shift in mood, time or thought.

Here is a stanza example written for this guide. Each stanza is a different room in the same house.

A House of Three Rooms

The kitchen smells of toast and tea,
The kettle hums its morning song,
A chair is always kept for me
Beneath a clock that's five past wrong.

The front room holds the afternoon:
A cat asleep on last week's news,
A puzzle missing half its moon,
And by the door, the muddy shoes.

Upstairs, the smallest room is mine:
A bed, a lamp, a shelf of books,
A window where the streetlamps shine,
And no one asks me how it looks.

That is three stanzas and twelve lines. Every stanza has four lines, so each is a quatrain, and each follows the same pattern: eight syllables per line, with lines 1 and 3 rhyming and lines 2 and 4 rhyming.

What does stanza mean?

The word comes from Italian, where stanza means "room", "stay" or "stopping place". As the Academy of American Poets puts it, each stanza is like a room in a house. Another name for a stanza is "stave", which hints at an early link with song. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of "stanza" in English to 1589.

Stanza names by number of lines

Stanzas are named by how many lines they have. These are the standard names, as listed in the Academy of American Poets' glossary, with a famous poem for each.

Lines	Stanza name	Also called	Famous example
1	Monostich	One-line stanza	The last line of the quiz poem on this page
2	Couplet	-	Alexander Pope's dog-collar epigram
3	Tercet	-	"The Eagle" by Alfred Tennyson
4	Quatrain	-	"The Tyger" by William Blake
5	Quintet	Quintain, cinquain	"To a Skylark" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
6	Sestet	Sexain	"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth
7	Septet	Rhyme royal, when it rhymes ABABBCC	Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
8	Octave	Ottava rima, when it rhymes ABABABCC	Don Juan by Lord Byron
9	No common general name	The best known is the Spenserian stanza	"The Eve of St. Agnes" by John Keats
10 or more	No standard name	Say "a ten-line stanza"	"Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats

Memory trick: a couplet is a couple of lines, quatre is French for four, "sestet" sounds like six, a septet goes with September (the seventh month of the old Roman calendar), and an octave has as many lines as an octopus has arms.

In an Italian sonnet, "octave" and "sestet" also name the first eight and last six lines, even when the sonnet is printed as one block (see our guide to types of sonnet).

Stanza vs verse vs line vs paragraph

Term	What it means	Example
Line	One row of words in a poem	"Tyger Tyger, burning bright," is one line
Stanza	A group of lines set off by white space	"The Tyger" has six stanzas
Verse	Poetry in general; strictly, one line of poetry; in songs and hymns, a stanza; in the Bible, a numbered part of a chapter	"Sing the second verse" means the second stanza
Paragraph	A group of sentences in prose	This page
Verse paragraph	An irregular block of lines in a long poem, often marked by an indent	Milton's Paradise Lost
Canto	A long section of an epic or long story poem	Byron's Don Juan

In a poetry essay, say "stanza". "Verse" is fine for songs and hymns, but because it can also mean a single line, "the third verse" of a poem is unclear. And a stanza is not a type of poem; for those, see our guide to types of poems.

Stanza examples from famous poems

All of these poems are in the public domain, and each text was checked against a published edition.

Couplet (2 lines)

A couplet is two lines that usually rhyme, and it can be a whole poem.

Example: "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog which I gave to his Royal Highness" by Alexander Pope

I am his Highness' Dog at Kew;
Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are you?

For open, closed and heroic couplets, see our couplet poems guide.

Tercet (3 lines)

Example: "The Eagle" by Alfred Tennyson (first published 1851), the full poem

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Two tercets, and all three lines of each one rhyme. The first stanza holds the eagle still; the second sends it diving. Tercets are also the building blocks of the villanelle: five tercets and a closing quatrain.

Quatrain (4 lines)

Example: "The Tyger" by William Blake (Songs of Experience, 1794), first stanza

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

"The Tyger" has six quatrains, each made of two rhyming pairs. Its last stanza repeats the first with one word changed: "Could frame" becomes "Dare frame". Quatrains can rhyme in several patterns, and our rhyme scheme guide shows how to label them.

Sestet (6 lines)

Example: "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth, first stanza

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Four lines of alternating rhyme, then a rhyming pair to finish (ABABCC), and every stanza follows the same plan.

Stanzas in free verse

Example: "Fog" by Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916), the full poem

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Two stanzas of different lengths, with no rhyme and no set beat. The break comes at the moment the fog stops and sits. In free verse poetry, the poet places each break by meaning, not by a pattern.

Write a poem in stanzas, free

Fixed stanza forms

A fixed stanza form sets the number of lines, the rhyme scheme and usually the rhythm, and the poet repeats it stanza after stanza. These five are the best known in English.

Form	Lines	Rhyme scheme	Rhythm	Famous use
Ballad stanza	4	ABCB (common meter: ABAB)	Lines of four and three beats, taking turns	"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; hymns like "Amazing Grace"
Rhyme royal	7	ABABBCC	Ten-syllable lines	Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
Ottava rima	8	ABABABCC	Ten-syllable lines in English (eleven in Italian)	Byron, Don Juan
Spenserian stanza	9	ABABBCBCC	Eight lines of iambic pentameter, then a twelve-syllable line (an alexandrine)	Spenser, The Faerie Queene; Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes"
Terza rima	3, chained together	ABA BCB CDC and so on	Usually iambic pentameter in English	Dante, The Divine Comedy; Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

Ballad stanza and common meter (4 lines)

Ballads began as story songs passed on by word of mouth. The ballad stanza is a quatrain whose lines take turns between four beats and three, with lines 2 and 4 rhyming (ABCB). With alternate rhymes (ABAB), the same rhythm is called common meter, the meter of many hymns. Our ballad poem guide shows how to write one.

Example: "Amazing Grace" by John Newton (Olney Hymns, 1779), first stanza, as printed in the 1840 edition

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound!)
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,—
Was blind, but now I see.

Count the syllables: 8, 6, 8, 6. Hymn books number these stanzas, and singers call them verses.

Rhyme royal (7 lines)

Rhyme royal has seven ten-syllable lines (iambic pentameter in English) rhyming ABABBCC. Chaucer made it popular, and it is called "royal" because his admirer King James I of Scotland used it in his own poetry.

Example: "After Closing" (written for this guide)

The lights go out along the lower floor, (A)
The last cart rattles back into its place, (B)
The night guard checks the lock on every door, (A)
And moonlight finds the window's dusty face (B)
Then slides across the desks, the empty space (B)
Where all day long the readers came and went. (C)
The books lean in and talk till night is spent. (C)

Ottava rima (8 lines)

Ottava rima began in Italy. Sir Thomas Wyatt brought it into English, and Lord Byron used it for his mock-epic Don Juan.

Example: Don Juan by Lord Byron (Cantos I and II published July 1819), Canto I, first stanza

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

Byron rhymes "Don Juan" with "new one" and "true one", so the name has to be said the English way, "Joo-un".

Spenserian stanza (9 lines)

Edmund Spenser invented this stanza for The Faerie Queene (1590 to 1596).

Example: "The Eve of St. Agnes" by John Keats (1820), first stanza

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

Terza rima (3-line stanzas, linked)

Terza rima is a chain of tercets. The middle line of each tercet sets the rhyme for the outer lines of the next, so the stanzas hook together: ABA BCB CDC. Dante created it for The Divine Comedy.

Example: "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820), first two stanzas

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

"Dead", the middle rhyme of the first stanza, returns as "red" and "bed" in the second.

How to count stanzas in a poem

1. Look for the white space. Every block of lines between blank lines is one stanza, even a single line.
2. Skip what is not a stanza. Titles, section numbers and indented lines are not stanza breaks.
3. Check which version you have. Poets revise. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" has three stanzas in its first printing of 1807 and four in Wordsworth's 1815 Poems, which added the stanza beginning "Continuous as the stars that shine".
4. Count by section in long poems. "Ode to the West Wind" has five numbered sections, each of four tercets and a closing couplet: five stanzas per section, 25 in all.

A poem with no blank lines has one stanza, which is why a sonnet printed as a single 14-line block counts as one. Quick check: "The Eagle" has 2 stanzas and 6 lines, "Fog" has 2 stanzas and 6 lines, and "The Tyger" has 6 stanzas and 24 lines.

Common mistakes with stanzas

• Calling stanzas paragraphs. In a poem, the word is stanza.
• Counting lines when the question asks for stanzas. "Fog" has six lines but two stanzas.
• Treating an indented line as a new stanza. Many printed poems indent every other line, as the 1840 edition of "Amazing Grace" does. Only white space starts a stanza.
• Thinking every stanza must rhyme or match in length. Free verse stanzas often do neither.

Practice: a quick stanza quiz

Read this poem, written for this guide, then answer the questions.

The Last Bell

The clock above the whiteboard crawls,
The radiator ticks and sighs,
A paper plane that no one calls
Its own goes looping past our eyes.

The bell! The chairs scrape back as one,
The doors swing wide, the hallways fill,
And forty sneakers start to run.

The classroom, suddenly, is still.

1. How many stanzas does "The Last Bell" have, and how many lines?
2. Name each of its stanzas by the number of lines.
3. Which fixed form has seven lines rhyming ABABBCC?
4. A long poem rhymes ABA BCB CDC. What form is it written in?
5. True or false: every stanza in a poem must have the same number of lines.
6. A hymn book calls the second numbered block of "Amazing Grace" the second verse. What is it in poetry terms?

Answers

1. Three stanzas and eight lines.
2. A quatrain (4 lines), a tercet (3 lines) and a monostich (1 line).
3. Rhyme royal.
4. Terza rima.
5. False. "Fog" has a two-line stanza and a four-line stanza.
6. A stanza: a quatrain in common meter.

Your turn: write three stanzas

Pick a place you know well and give each of three four-line stanzas one part of it, the way "A House of Three Rooms" moves from kitchen to bedroom. Then rewrite it as free verse and let each stanza be as long as its moment needs. Stuck? Type your place into the free AI poem generator, see how it groups the lines, then rework them in your own words. Our guide on how to write a poem takes it from there.

Try a sonnet: three quatrains and a couplet

Stanza FAQs

How long is a stanza?

Any length, from one line up. The named lengths run from the one-line monostich to the eight-line octave; longer stanzas, like the nine-line Spenserian stanza, are named by their form or simply by their line count.

Is a stanza the same as a verse?

In songs and hymns, yes. In poetry, "verse" can mean a single line or poetry in general, so "stanza" is clearer.

Does a stanza have to rhyme?

No. Many stanzas follow a rhyme pattern, but free verse stanzas, like the two in "Fog", do not rhyme at all.

How many stanzas does a poem need?

Any number, even one. Pope's dog-collar couplet is a one-stanza poem, and a villanelle always has six stanzas.