Question

What are examples of stanzas?

Answer 1

Hint: A stanza is composed of a group of lines that form a part of a poem. It can be of any number of lines and can have any rhyme, rhythm and scheme. A poem usually has more than one stanza and is separated by line spacing. A stanza is equivalent to paragraphs in prose.

Complete answer:
The world of poetry knows no inbounds and therefore everybody has their unique way of writing, resulting in a variety of poetry styles. Stanzas are no exception, there are many types of stanzas namely couplet, tercet, quatrain, quintet, sestet and so on.

Couplet: A stanza that has two lines that end on a rhyming note.
Tercet: A stanza with three lines that may or may not end on a rhyming note.
Quatrain: A stanza with four lines that have different rhyming schemes(aaaa, aabb, abab).
Quintet: A stanza with five lines that may or may not have a rhyming pattern.
Sestet: A stanza with six lines that may or may not rhyme.

For example:
“Think what you will, we seize into our hands
 His plate, his goods, his money and his lands”. (Couplet)
                                             - Richard II, William Shakespeare

“The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt, he falls.” (Tercet)

                         - The Eagle, Alfred Lord Tennyson

“The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off and sank
Like, lead into the sea.” (Quatrain)
                                  -The Rise of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Note: Rhyming schemes are patterns in which the lines of a poem rhyme. There are various rhyming schemes such as aaaa, aba and so on. The odd lines of a stanza have an ‘a’ rhyming pattern and even lines have ‘b’ rhyming.

So when we say that a stanza has an AAAA rhyming scheme we mean to say that all four lines of the stanza end on the same rhyming note. When it is aba, it means that the first and the third line(both odd numbers) have the same rhyming pattern and the second has a slightly different note that does not match with the first and third.