Spenserian Stanza
Quick answer: The Spenserian stanza explained: nine lines, ABABBCBCC, and a final alexandrine. History from The Faerie Queene to Keats, plus how to write your own.
Edmund Spenser built himself a stanza for The Faerie Queene (1590) and no one has improved on it since: nine lines rhymed ABABBCBCC, the first eight in iambic pentameter, the ninth a longer alexandrine, an iambic hexameter that stretches out like a wave reaching further up the beach than the eight before it. That final line is the stanza's signature, a built-in slow motion.
Spenser adapted the design from Chaucer's Monk's Tale stanza (ABABBCBC), adding the ninth line and its rhyme. The result is dense, musical and unhurried, with only three rhyme sounds across nine lines, which asks a lot of English and gives back a heavy brocade of sound when it works.
Invented for an epic, revived for Romanticism
Spenser wrote thousands of these stanzas across the six books of The Faerie Queene, and the form was so identified with him that it lay largely untouched for two centuries; eighteenth-century imitations such as Thomson's The Castle of Indolence used it half in homage, half in parody. Then the Romantics fell in love. Byron chose it for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Shelley for Adonais, his elegy for Keats, and Keats himself for The Eve of St. Agnes (1820), where the stanza's slow richness matches candlelight, cold chapels and embroidered casements. Tennyson's The Lotos-Eaters opens in Spenserians for the same reason: the stanza is a natural drug for narrative time.
The specification
Nine lines. Rhyme scheme ABABBCBCC. Lines one to eight are iambic pentameter; line nine is an alexandrine, six iambic feet. Note the economy: just three rhyme sounds, with B appearing four times and C three. That B quadruple is the stanza's real difficulty in English, harder than anything in rhyme royal or even ottava rima.
The internal structure echoes its ancestry: an ABAB quatrain, a linking BB moment, a BCBC movement, and the C-rhymed couplet formed by lines eight and nine, except the second half of that couplet is two feet longer. The alexandrine invites a caesura near its middle and rewards imagery with breadth: horizons, processions, sleep, the sea.
Writing one without drowning
Choose your B sound before anything else; it must rhyme four times, so test it against at least six candidate words. Draft the stanza as two sentences at most, letting syntax flow across the rhyme joints, and save a spacious image for the ninth line rather than a summary. The alexandrine should feel like arrival, not overspill.
One stanza is a fine poem on its own; a sequence is a serious undertaking. If you attempt a narrative, keep each stanza to a single scene-beat, and vary your caesura placement in the alexandrines or the endings will start to chime like a grandfather clock. Structure this deliberate scores well with contest judges, who can tell a chosen form from an accidental one at a glance.
Its temperament, and the classic mistake
The Spenserian stanza suits luxury, ceremony, dream, elegy and slow narrative. It is hopeless for banter; the machinery is too grand for jokes, as Byron discovered and half-exploited.
The classic beginner mistake is padding to fill nine lines, especially the last. An alexandrine of throat-clearing sinks the whole stanza. If line nine is not your best line, the stanza is not finished.
What poets can take from this
- Audition your B rhyme sound first; it must supply four line-endings.
- Write the stanza as one or two long sentences, not nine short ones.
- Give the alexandrine a wide image and a natural mid-line pause.
- Keep one scene-beat per stanza in narrative sequences.
- Use slant rhyme sparingly to ease the B-rhyme burden.
- Read a stanza of The Eve of St. Agnes aloud to feel the ninth line land.
Try it yourself
Write a single Spenserian stanza describing a room five minutes after a celebration has ended, saving the widest, saddest image for the alexandrine.
Questions
What is the Spenserian stanza's rhyme scheme?
ABABBCBCC across nine lines: eight in iambic pentameter and a ninth in iambic hexameter, called an alexandrine. Spenser devised it for The Faerie Queene in 1590.
What is the ninth line of a Spenserian stanza called?
An alexandrine, a twelve-syllable iambic hexameter line. Its extra length slows the stanza's close, giving the form its characteristic dying fall.
Which poems besides The Faerie Queene use it?
Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, Shelley's Adonais and the opening of Tennyson's The Lotos-Eaters are the most celebrated examples.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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