Stanza Quotes

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

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

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

The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell. ~ Lucius Shepard

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

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

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

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

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

In the Bhagavad Gita. One stanza reads: "Offering the inhaling breath into the exhaling breath and offering the exhaling breath into the inhaling breath, the yogi neutralizes both breaths; thus he releases prana from the heart and brings life force under his control."2 The interpretation is: "The yogi arrests decay in the body by securing an additional supply of prana (life force) through quieting the action of the lungs and heart; he also arrests mutations of growth in the body by control of apana (eliminating current). Thus neutralizing decay and growth, the yogi learns life-force control." Another Gita stanza states: "That meditation-expert (muni) becomes eternally free who, seeking the Supreme Goal, is able to withdraw from external phenomena by fixing his gaze within the mid-spot of the eyebrows and by neutralizing the even currents of prana and apana [that flow] within the nostrils and lungs; and to control his sensory mind and intellect; and to banish desire, fear, and anger."3 ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

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

There is no man so good
that he has no flaw,
nor a man so bad he's good for nothing.
-- Hávámál, stanza 133. ~ Jackson Crawford

Wherever it left us,
we were barely learning to live with it
when here came Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams
to tell us that no one has ever been loved
the way everybody wants to be loved,
and that's hard. That's hard.
last stanza of How Step by Step We Have Come to Understand ~ Miller Williams

We write a line we're especially proud of, and weeks later find it staring -no glaring- back at us from some stanza in George Herbert or Emily Dickinson. All poets have debts outstanding. It's how we learn; how we adore; we come to ourselves by putting those selves into the hands of masters. With experience we learn how to disguise our thefts (sometimes by flaunting them). It is how we both continue and extend a tradition. -J.D. McClatchy, Writing Between the Lines ~ Robin Behn

All human history attests
That happiness for man, - the hungry sinner! -
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 99 ~ George Gordon Byron

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

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

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

o have good intentions is irrelevant and misleading. All evil that has ever been done in the universe was done with good intentions. You must measure effect, impact, and consequence, not intentions. - Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Thirteenth Binding Fifteenth Stanza ~ Aaron Lee Yeager

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

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

Being older, I began to understand the lyrics. At the beginning, it sounds like a guy is trying to get his girlfriend to secretly meet up with him at midnight. But it's an odd place for a tryst, a hanging tree, where a man was hung for murder. The murderer's lover must have had something to do with the killing, or maybe they were just going to punish her anyway, because his corpse called out for her to flee. That's weird obviously, the talking-corpse bit, but it's not until the third verse that "The Hanging Tree" begins to get unnerving. You realize the singer of the song is the dead murderer. He's still in the hanging tree. And even though he told his lover to flee, he keeps asking if she's coming to meet him. The phrase Where I told you to run, so we'd both be free is the most troubling because at first you think he's talking about when he told her to flee, presumably to safety. But then you wonder if he meant for her to run to him. To death. In the final stanza, it's clear that that's what he was waiting for. His lover, with her rope necklace, hanging dead next to him in the tree.

I used to think the murderer was the creepiest guy imaginable. Now, with a couple of trips to the Hunger Games under my belt, I decide not to judge him without knowing more details. Maybe his lover was already sentenced to death and he was trying to make it easier. To let her know he'd be waiting. Or maybe he thought the place he was leaving her was really worse than death. Didn't I wa ~ Suzanne Collins

Contra la policía/Against the Police

My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it's against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it's against the police
I haven't written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn't against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police. ~ Miguel James

The Worm at the Bottom of the Bottle
Blue agave, spiny like the desert cacti,
once fermented in the mesquite barrels of Jalisco, Mexico,
is now manifest in the liquid smoke of my Tequila bottle.
By the third shot, I think I'm in love with the gusano,
the red caterpillar people mistake for a worm, pickling
intact, attesting to the purity of the holy spirits.
I shake the bottle and the worm falls like the fresh powder
in my Montreal snowglobe of an ice skater,
the globe's Christmas melody replaced by La Cucaracha
playing convivially on my mind's soundtrack
(in a bit in a rut because I've forgotten the second stanza).
The worm has hit bottom, and so have I.
I don't take this an ominous portent,
but as a sign it's time to ditch the glass
and drink straight from the bottle. ~ Beryl Dov

Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza. [ ] but his stanza is not completely empty [ * ] ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

She received fine silk gloves and music boxes and even a curled lock of prickly white hair tied with a red velvet ribbon. That particularly appalling gift had even come with a poem:

Roses are red, violets are blue,
I would even trim my mustache for you!

She had memorized the short stanza against her will and the words had nauseated her on multiple occasions since. ~ Marissa Meyer

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

On Translating Eugene Onegin


1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.


2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

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

Do you wish to be accepted for who you are? Do you wish to be loved without condition? Do you wish for people to welcome you, in spite of your flaws, in spite of your shortcomings, in spite of your mistakes? Then why do you insist on changing others? -Evening Prayer from the Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Eleventh Binding Third Stanza ~ Aaron Lee Yeager

I have said this to explain the stanza that follows, in which the soul replies to those who call in question its holy tranquillity, who will have it wholly occupied with outward duties, that its light may shine before the world: these persons have no conception of the fibres and the unseen root whence the sap is drawn, and which nourish the fruit. ~ John Of The Cross

Is it odd how asymmetrical
Is "symmetry"?
"Symmetry" is asymmetrical.
How odd it is.

This stanza remains unchanged if read word by word from the end to the beginning-it is symmetrical with respect to backward reading. ~ Mario Livio

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

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

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

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

Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro
And what should they know of England who only England know?
The English Flag, Stanza 1 (1891) ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

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

I never indulge in rhyme or stanza Unless I'm in bed with the influenza. ~ Quintus Ennius

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

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin. ~ Virginia Euwer Wolff

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

Had I only known my letters
Would be of such importance
I'd empty myself on paper
Every single morning'

And it was for such reason,
as she read his little stanza,
that she decided to stamp
one
final
letter:

'Every single morning
I'd empty myself on paper
You were my greater importance
That's why I wrote you letters. ~ Mie Hansson

please allow me
to dance the triumphant dance
as my patience
is rewarded by your smiling
blissful being!--Stanza from Faceless Wonder ~ Tim Kavi

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownBilly Collins

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