Glosa
Quick answer: The glosa: a Spanish court form that borrows four lines from another poet and grows four ten-line stanzas around them. Rules, history and writing steps.
Every glosa begins with theft, openly declared. The poet takes four consecutive lines from another poet's work, prints them at the top as an epigraph called the cabeza, and then writes four stanzas, each of which ends by absorbing one of the borrowed lines in order. The form is homage built into architecture: your poem literally grows around someone else's.
The glosa arose in the Spanish courts of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where glossing a well-known text was both compliment and competition. It faded for centuries, then found an unlikely second home in Canada when P.K. Page published Hologram: A Book of Glosas in 1994, glossing poets from Rilke to Elytis. Her example made the form a live option in English.
The rules
The classic glosa is precise, and its music comes from the placement of the borrowed lines.
Choosing your cabeza
This choice is most of the battle. You need four consecutive lines that can each bear the weight of ending a stanza, which means four lines with some independence from one another. A quatrain that is one tight syntactic unit will fight you; lines that each contain a complete gesture will cooperate. Choose a poet whose voice differs from yours, since the friction is productive, and consider copyright: quoting a living or recently dead poet at length requires permission, so poems published before 1928 are the safe hunting ground. Dickinson, Hopkins, Keats and Yeats have all been glossed repeatedly for good reason.
Writing the stanzas
Work backwards. For each stanza, place the borrowed line at position ten, set your rhymes at six and nine if you are keeping them, then ask what nine-line journey would make that ending inevitable. The glosa fails when the borrowed line sits like a quotation and succeeds when a first-time reader cannot hear the join. Match the borrowed line's metre in your ninth line especially, so the handover is smooth. Your four stanzas should also build their own argument across the poem; a glosa is a conversation with the source, not four separate exercises, and the best ones end somewhere the original poet never went.
What the form is for, and its trap
The glosa suits homage, argument with the dead, elegy for a poet you loved, and any occasion where reading and writing want to be the same act. It teaches craft faster than almost any exercise, because you must study four lines deeply enough to continue them.
The trap is ventriloquism. If your forty lines imitate the borrowed voice, the poem becomes pastiche with footnotes. Keep your own diction and let the two voices argue; the reader should always know which lines are yours by their sound, then be startled at how naturally the borrowed ones arrive.
What poets can take from this
- Choose four borrowed lines that each contain a complete gesture.
- Use pre-1928 sources unless you have permission to quote.
- Draft each stanza backwards from its borrowed tenth line.
- Match the borrowed line's rhythm in your ninth line for a smooth seam.
- Keep your own voice distinct; homage is not imitation.
Try it yourself
Take four consecutive lines from any poem published before 1928 that you have loved for years, and write a glosa in which your stanzas disagree with the borrowed lines until the final stanza concedes.
Questions
What is the structure of a glosa?
Four borrowed consecutive lines from another poet, the cabeza, followed by four ten-line stanzas. Each stanza ends with one borrowed line in order, and traditionally lines six and nine rhyme with that closing line.
Do I need permission to write a glosa?
You need permission only if the source is in copyright. Poems published before 1928 are public domain and safe to quote; for later work, seek the rights holder's consent before publishing.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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