Monk's Tale Stanza
Quick answer: Monk's Tale stanza explained: Chaucer's eight-line ABABBCBC pentameter stanza, its links to the ballade and Spenser, and how to use it in new poems.
Before Spenser added his famous ninth line, the stanza looked like this: eight lines of iambic pentameter rhymed ABABBCBC. English poetry knows it as the Monk's Tale stanza, after the sequence in The Canterbury Tales where Chaucer's Monk grinds through tragedy after tragedy, the falls of Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Julius Caesar and more, one doomed notable per stretch of stanzas, until the other pilgrims beg him to stop.
The shape was not Chaucer's invention so much as his import. It is the huitain of the French ballade tradition he knew from Machaut and Deschamps, naturalised into English pentameter. Its double life, French lyric and English narrative, gives it an unusually flexible temperament.
From French ballades to English tragedy
In French practice, an eight-line stanza rhymed ababbcbc was the standard building block of the ballade, three stanzas and an envoi, each ending on a refrain. Chaucer, who translated and imitated French court poetry throughout his career, used the stanza for lyrics as well as for the Monk's relentless catalogue of falls, written in the 1380s. Fifteenth-century poets, Lydgate especially, adopted it for moral and historical verse; the enormous Tudor anthology A Mirror for Magistrates continued the de casibus tradition, tragedy as the fall of the great, in similar shapes. Spenser then took ABABBCBC, added a C-rhymed alexandrine, and made the Spenserian stanza: this form is that one's direct parent.
How the stanza works
Eight pentameter lines, three rhyme sounds: ABABBCBC. The A sound rhymes twice, B four times, C twice. That B burden is the technical challenge; the sound must stay fresh across four appearances, so pick it as carefully as a Spenserian poet picks theirs.
Structurally the stanza pivots at its centre. Lines four and five form a BB pair, an internal couplet bridging the two halves, and the second half's BCBC echoes the first half's ABAB with one rhyme swapped. The stanza therefore feels like a step and its echo, ideal for verse that states a fortune and then reverses it, which is exactly what the Monk does: prosperity in the first movement, ruin in the second.
Using it today
The stanza suits any poem built on rise and fall, before and after, appearance and truth. Structure each stanza in two movements of four lines, hinged at the BB couplet, and let the hinge carry the reversal: the diagnosis, the betrayal, the bill arriving. For sequences, follow Chaucer's model of one subject per stanza-group and resist his vice of monotony; the Knight interrupts the Monk for a reason, and your reader will too if every stanza tolls the same bell.
If the eight lines start to feel airless, you have discovered why Spenser added a ninth. Consider that an invitation to study both forms side by side.
Strengths and the characteristic fault
This is a stanza for gravity with momentum: moral narrative, historical portrait, elegy, formal complaint. The four-fold B rhyme knits each stanza tight, and the two-movement structure builds reversal into the architecture.
The characteristic fault is sameness across a sequence, the exact failing Chaucer dramatised. Vary sentence lengths, entry points and where the reversal falls, or your tragedies will blur into one long tolling.
What poets can take from this
- Select a B rhyme sound with at least six candidates; it appears four times.
- Hinge each stanza at the central BB couplet.
- Give the stanza two movements: situation, then reversal.
- Assign one subject per stanza or stanza-group in sequences.
- Vary syntax aggressively across stanzas to escape the tolling effect.
- Compare a stanza of the Monk's Tale with one of Spenser's to hear what the ninth line adds.
Try it yourself
Choose a public figure, historical or living, and write their rise and fall in three Monk's Tale stanzas, placing the reversal at the middle couplet of the second stanza.
Questions
What is the Monk's Tale stanza?
An eight-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ABABBCBC, used by Chaucer for the Monk's Tale in The Canterbury Tales. It derives from the French ballade's huitain.
How is it related to the Spenserian stanza?
Directly: Spenser took the ABABBCBC pattern and added a ninth line, an alexandrine rhyming C, to create the stanza of The Faerie Queene. The Monk's Tale stanza is its eight-line ancestor.
What is a de casibus tragedy?
A medieval genre recounting the falls of great figures from prosperity to ruin, after Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. Chaucer's Monk's Tale is the classic English example, told in this stanza.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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