A Stanza Quotes & Sayings

I will not make a sonnet from
Each little private martyrdom;
Nor out of love left dead with time
Construe a stanza or a rime.

We do not suffer to afford
The searched for and the subtle word:
There is too much that may not be
At the caprice of prosody. — Joseph Auslander

Some poets write pages upon pages because their hearts have a song to sing and their melodies cannot be contained in a single stanza... and I find myself typing out a quote because my soul is still gasping for breath, and all the words form a single sentence: I miss us. — Alfa H

For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars — Richard Fortey

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end. — Don Paterson

Woman, I would have been your child, to drink the milk of your breasts as from a well, to see and feel you at my side and have you in your gold laughter and your crystal voice.
To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers and adore you in the sorrowful bones of dust and lime, to watch you passing painlessly by
to emerge in the stanza-cleansed of all evil.
How I would love you woman, how I would love you, love you as no one ever did!
Die and still
love you more.
And still
love you more
and more. — Pablo Neruda

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A line is a fuse that's lit. The line smolders, the rhyme explodes - and by a stanza a city is blown to bits. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

BOOK THE FIRST Which treats of the Night of Sense. STANZA THE FIRST On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings - oh, happy chance! - I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest. — San Juan De La Cruz

Most people who idealize strength are ignorant of how it is acquired. Someone who is in constant agony does not notice a prick of the finger. Profound suffering sets a higher threshold, allowing one to bear with ease that which would have been burdensome before. If you wish to be strong, know first that this is the path of it. -The Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Seventh Binding, Thirteenth Stanza — Aaron Lee Yeager

Until then I had lived as I had painted and versified - that is, I never got far beyond priming canvas, beyond penning an outline, a first act, a first stanza. There are simply people who start all sorts of things and yet never finish any of them. And that was the kind of person I was. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Sergei recited a Pushkin poem in Russian while I recited a stanza by Racine from my French classical repertoire. Both of us, romantics at heart, were inebriated by the fresh air, the calm and the greenery surrounding us, and we decided to ride to a village where we could taste the local food and wash it down with beer for Sergei and tea for me. — Liliane Willens

The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. — Thomas Carlyle

A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal misery - and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core. — Werner Herzog

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse. — James Fenton

Here's a stanza from page 68 where the heel of a narrator makes the following observations regarding his "girl-friend" during a post-tryst afterglow:

Several hours later we were lying in her bed, exhausted...
After that one, in the dim lamplight of her bedroom, diffused through the sheets as if through a scrim, I took a good look at her and tried to figure out how she got to me the way she did.

Her face was long enough to qualify as horsy, with a nose to proportion, ever so slightly bulbous & two or three degrees off-true to the left; her teeth were a little too prominent, her lower incisors an ivory jumble, and with her hair up her ears looked like saucers.
There was no denying, though, that she got me going in a way few others ever had.

"Jesus, it's still freezing in here," she said.
— Scott Phillips

Sometimes I marveled at how grown-up we'd all become, and then Dick would recite a sixteen-stanza penis-based epic poem, and I'd take it back. — Molly Harper

I'm engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton's A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it's a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own. — Chila Woychik

I found an empty chair
and sat on it
to find myself even emptier.
I found a broken glass
and looked at it
to see my dissolved face
a little prettier
I found a steep doorway
and entered
in order to close my exit.
From the poem 'Blue Stanzas — Munia Khan

America remained a land of promise for lovers of freedom. Even Byron, at a moment when he was disgusted with Napoleon for not committing suicide, wrote an eloquent stanza in praise of Washington. — Bertrand Russell

There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love. — Michael Chabon

I was in the darkness," he began, quoting the poem. "I could not see my words Nor the wishes of my heart. Then suddenly there was a great light - " He stopped at the stanza break, grinning at Thomas for effect. "'Let me into the darkness again.' That's what we do, you know. We stumble around until we get what we want, and then once we see exactly what it was we really wanted we're terrified of it. — Kate Corcino

Madame V begins the lesson by reading aloud the first stanza of a famous French poem: Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville; Quelle est cette langueur Qui penetre mon coeur? Then she looks up and without any warning she calls on me to translate it. I swallow hard, and try: "It's raining in my heart like it's raining in the city. What is this sadness that pierces my heart?" Saying these words out loud, right in front of the whole class, makes me feel like I'm not wearing any clothes. — Sonya Sones

Sundays, like a stanza break
Or shower's end of all applause,
For some old unexplaining sake
The optimistic tread these shores,
As lonely as the dead awake
Or God among the dinosaurs. — Glyn Maxwell

As a woman still,
without the right kind of mouth,
my tongue's of no use. — Kristen Henderson

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind's prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind's unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people's tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind's plaintive subsistence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The Italian word 'stanza' means 'a room', and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent. — James Fenton

If in poetry court she was called
to testify on matters where
I was condemned to imprisonment: parking my ego
at a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme,
dealing stanzaics to children, shooting
off my mouth, getting cute, for even this
latest attempt at verse, she would tell the whole truth,
she would admit from the pit
of her unsung brilliance,
from all of the paintings and poems
she herself has been making
and storing in the vast empire of her
singing soul, your Honor, my daughter is guilty
of plagiarizing my cells. — Kristen Henderson

Judge that boy if you must; for debauchery, for objectifying innocence ... but before you finalize your verdict, oh innocent reader, I beg you to scan again that last stanza. What you and I overlooked in our cloud of perversion and nasty objectification was the unrestrained joy of a little girl playing dress-up for the very first time. — Jake Vander Ark

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show-off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners. For him, the entire German language - all the way from the keep-off-the-grass signs in the park to Goethe's stanza on the wall - was irradiated with sex. For him, the difference between a table and ein Tisch was that a table was the dining table in his mother's house and ein Tisch was ein Tisch in the Cosy Corner. * — Christopher Isherwood

Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the centre vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one. — Vladimir Nabokov

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza. — Joanna Newsom

The first stanza of Eyes In Moonlight Drown, a poem from DeadVerse.

With your face framed in a halo of stars,
your hair melts into trailing clouds,
and your eyes in moonlight drown.
A man could lose himself
in those freckled irises,
reflecting the galaxies above;
surely he could fall into their promise
of eternity, of Heaven, of love.
Your lips glisten, part, and beckon,
a smile of warm invitation,
a suggestion of sweet intensity,
a loss of self in addictive agony.
For we translate these aesthetics
into something mystical;
ideas of fantasy, of fiction,
obscuring the clinical truth
of chemical reactions,
electric sparks, responses
as sure as gravity,
measurable yet beyond cold,
above philosophy and below truth. — Scott Kaelen

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine ... While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.
It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing. — Charles Simic

You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know. — Vikram Seth

In our language rhyme is a barrel. A barrel of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line smoulders to the end and explodes; and the town is blown sky-high in a stanza. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem. — James Fenton

Is there a parson much bemused in beer, a maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, a clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, who pens a stanza when he should engross? — Alexander Pope

Sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge." Sri — Paramahansa Yogananda

On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of ... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach. — A.E. Housman

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. — Robert Indiana

For no one, in our long decline,So dusty, spiteful and divided,Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,Or loved them half as much as I did. [stanza 3]The library was most inviting:The books upon the crowded shelvesWere mainly of our private writing:We kept a school and taught ourselves. [stanza 15]From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,Theres nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends. [stanza 22]You do retain the song we set,And how it rises, trips and scans?You keep the sacred memory yet,Republicans? Republicans?[stanza 36] — Hilaire Belloc

The disadvantages and dangers of the author's calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships, unimportant ... Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song, or a story, and having done this, be rid of it. The artist is the only free man. — W. Somerset Maugham

One of the most remarkable of these hymns is that addressed to the Unknown God. The poet says: "In the beginning there arose the Golden Child. As soon as he was born he alone was the lord of all that is. He established the earth and this heaven." The hymn consists of ten stanzas, in which the Deity is celebrated as the maker of the snowy mountains, the sea and the distant river, who made fast the awful heaven, He who alone is God above all gods, before whom heaven and earth stand trembling in their mind. Each stanza concludes with the refrain, "Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?" We have in this hymn a most sublime conception of the Supreme Being, and while there are many Vedic hymns whose tone is pantheistic and seems to imply that the wild forces of nature are Gods who rule the world, this hymn to the Unknown God is as purely monotheistic as a psalm of David, and shows a spirit of religious awe as profound as any we find in the Hebrew Scriptures. — Epiphanius Wilson

Hardy's astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also moves easily between the amplitude of dramatic monologue and the compression of imagism. He experiments continually with an ingenious variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes, rejecting the fluidity of contemporary poetry for his own idiosyncratic style, based on a real understanding of the variety of speech rhythms and registers. Each individual poem is designed to express in its language and form, and with utter honesty, Hardy's impressions of life. — Geoffrey Harvey

When a tragedy occurs, do not say that your thoughts are with the victims. People do not need thoughts, they need blankets, they need food, they need water, they need shelter. They need a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold. All the cumulative thoughts from every sentient being that has ever existed is worth less than a single glass of water given to a thirsty person. - Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Eighteenth Binding, Fourteenth Stanza — Aaron Lee Yeager

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm. — Jane Hirshfield

I am nothing but a dilettante,
a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the
so-called unprofitable arts.
Above all else I am a dilettante in life
Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry.
I never
got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza.
There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything.
I am
such a one. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch