stanza question

[Melody]

I was wondering what the source was for the poem "Trees" on page 235 because I was curious if the quatrain form was the way Kilmer really wrote it. As I looked at the poem, (actually I was standing in the bathroom brushing my teeth and thinking about the poem!) I didn't think the quatrain form made sense. If a stanza is a complete thought or poetic paragraph, the quatrain doesn't paragraph it right imho. Perhaps my understanding of stanzas is faulty, but I would either have a couplet followed by an "octain" and a last couplet, or I would have 6 separate couplets. I found the poem on-line in order to print it for a model and found that on-line, it is always formatted as 6 separate couplets, but I do not necessarily trust the accuracy of the Internet. I don't want to stress about stanzas, and perhaps this is part of the art of poetry where things don't always follow hard and fast rules, but I'd be interested in someone else's opinion.

As a bonus aside, I have always enjoyed this poem and have always imagined the poetess to be a gentle, humble and gracious Mary Cassatt-portrait-looking sort of person. I was startled today to find out that the author's name is Alfred Joyce Kilmer and he was killed in action in WWI.

Melody

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

AW!! Alfred... I didn't know that either. Too bad. I had a soft Vctorian female in mind too

As for the quattrains as the stanza forms here... I wish I knew where I got this poem from. I suspect I got it from Handbook of Nature Study, but I cannot remember and I did not reference it in my notes, probably because I saw it in more than one place.

I would agree with you that arranging it in quattrains doesn't really make as much sense in terms of complete thoughts, since the last two stanzas in particular are so linked in topic and thought.

The rules for stanza divisions, topics, and complete thoughts are somewhat fluid, however. Poetry is not a set of "rules", it really is a set of guidelines to help create the most effective and impressive strucutre of word in an arrangement to say what you want to say.

Harvey's Revised simply defines a stanza as a group of lines forming a division of the poem, which is a lesser definition than the one we offered in CW Poetry.

HTH, and thanks for the info, most interesting,

Lene