We call them “innings,” now, but originally time
divisions in baseball were called “stanzas,” as we call the divisions in
poems. The word derives from a 16th
Italian word meaning ‘standing place.’
Sometimes students call stanzas “paragraphs,” and metaphorically
speaking, stanza breaks in poetry function like paragraph breaks in prose—drop and
add white space. Shift in focus.
Numbers are meaningful as we saw in Poetry
by the Numbers: (1) What Numbers Can Mean, so, too, are the sizes and
patterns of stanzas in poems. When I was
writing a poem about gender politics in baseball (note the epigraph below), I
divided the lines into four-line stanzas to reflect the geometry of the
baseball diamond. I might have opted for
nine stanzas to reflect the nine innings of a standard game—but the theme here
is that there’s something missing, an imbalance, in the way women and men are
recognized as poets. So it’s six innings,
to return the favor, for this poem:
Breaking Ball
but I don’t. Baseball is a sport, not poetry.
—David H. Martinez, The Book of Baseball Literacy
But David, poetry is a sport, not
baseball—
and it’s for the boys. Who’s always up
but the Collinses and Dickeys?
When it’s Olds, it’s that she has a bat,
so to speak, in every poem.
No, the Babe in the bullpen is the
ballgirl.
Stevie, Anne, Sylvia had to strike
themselves out for a scoring position
in the major leagues of all-time.
Emily had to make an appeal play
of her shut out. Come on, guys,
of course poetry is a sport. Why else
do I wind up winding up pompons in the
stands?
I get The Lip for my line drives.
My hot doggerels are checked in a
hawking tray.
At best, like Pam, I’m an ump in the
Triple As,
out of the box, always behind the
plate. Oh
change-up Sadaharu Oh for Oh Susanna
when poetry is not just a sport but is
baseball—the growing of green turf
around our altar of dust—
the hush, The Big Hurt,
the crack, the song—
the ball we watch like the Sun—
One of the oldest
poetic forms is the ballad—four-line stanzas with regular rhyme schemes. The name “ballad” derives from the same root
as “ballet,” and it was originally a “dance song,” sung while dancing. That the
ballad has four lines and a regular tempo is appropriate to its dancing origins—balanced,
rhythmic, easily agreed-upon steps for the couples dancing. Imagine dancing in a couple to a ballad—it becomes
a body chant, mesmerizing, and conducive to intimacy. Here are the first three stanzas
of one of my favorites, a traditional English folksong:
Greensleeves
Alas my love
you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so long
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so long
Delighting in
your company.
Greensleeves
was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves
was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves.
And who but my lady Greensleeves.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves.
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves.
These four-line stanzas, called “quatrains,” offer us the
comfort of the number 4—completion, balance, predictability—especially when
offering a ‘standing place’ for romantic love—which is fraught and
destabilizing by its nature.
Consider, now, the effect if we
divide “Greensleeves” into tercets, 3-line stanzas, instead:
Greensleeves
Alas my love you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so long
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so long
Delighting in your company.
Greensleeves
was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves.
If the
number 4 is universally the number of balance and completeness, then threes
are essentially unstable, incomplete—a sense that something is missing, a sense
of longing and vigilance—as if waiting for the lover’s attention, for the lover
to show some sign of recognition.
The hesitation
at the first stanza break of the tercet version, on the word “long,” introduces
a sense of weariness, yearning, and loss—even whininess that could be
off-putting to or guilting of the lover.
Whereas the quatrain version, ending in “Delighting in your company,” with
a period at the end of the quatrain, is more assertive and flattering. We have a resting place, a secure standing
from which to launch into the next stanza.
We have the lover’s attention.
Consider, Dylan
Thomas’s famous villanelle, a form built predominantly on tercets:
Do not go
gentle into that good night
Do not go
gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The tercets,
again, offer an experience of instability, waiting for the fourth line and the
rhyme to complement/complete the second line.
Notice, too, that the last stanza, a quatrain, does offer us the delayed
stability, but, especially given a theme of the poem, we get a sense of it’s-too-late
finality—after five stanzas of instable tercets, the final stanza has the sense
of giving up.
It is no
surprise that the villanelle form is almost universally about loss—except for
instances in which the poet is parodying the form, itself.
Relineate
my poem into tercets. Compare the two
versions. What effects do you get? Commit
to writing two poems: one in quatrains, one in tercets. Compare the results and
the experience. What happens when you
restanza them into each other’s form?
In
our next post, we will consider the effect of five-line stanzas.
Works Cited:
Cover Art: https://athletics.millikin.edu/news/2018/12/7/workman-family-baseball-field-construction-update.aspx
Text:
