What Is a Decima?
Quick answer: A decima is a ten-line Spanish stanza rhymed abbaaccddc, the espinela. Learn its history, its life in Latin American song, and how to write one in English.
A décima is a ten-line stanza from the Spanish-language tradition, normally written in eight-syllable lines and rhymed abbaaccddc. That particular rhyme arrangement is called the espinela, after Vicente Espinel, the poet and musician who fixed the pattern in his 1591 collection Diversas rimas. The form asks a lot in a small space: ten short lines, only four rhyme sounds, each sound recurring in a strict order. Done well, a décima closes like a well-made box.
What the definition cannot convey is how alive the form still is. The décima left the printed page centuries ago and became one of the great oral, sung, improvised forms of the Americas, from Puerto Rican mountain music to Cuban country verse to the competitive singers of Argentina and Chile. There are people alive today who can improvise flawless décimas on any topic you shout at them, in real time, to music. Very few European stanza forms can claim anything like that afterlife.
The Shape of a Décima
The classic espinela runs abbaaccddc across ten octosyllabic lines. Notice the architecture inside that string: the first four lines, abba, form an enclosed unit, exactly like the opening of a Petrarchan sonnet's octave. Convention places a pause, often a full stop, at the end of line four. The fifth line then pivots, rhyming back to the a sound while launching the new material, and the remaining lines drive to the close on the c rhyme.
That pause after line four gives the décima a two-part logic: a four-line setup and a six-line development, a miniature version of a sonnet's problem-and-answer structure. Improvisers exploit this constantly, using the opening quatrain to state a theme or a joke's premise and the closing six to complicate it and snap it shut. The final line carries enormous weight; a décima that ends weakly feels broken in a way a loose free-verse poem never does.
Espinel and the Spanish Golden Age
Vicente Espinel was a Renaissance all-rounder: priest, novelist, poet, and musician, credited by tradition with adding the fifth string to the Spanish guitar. Ten-line stanzas existed before him, but his 1591 arrangement proved so much better balanced than its rivals that it swallowed the whole category; within a generation, décima and espinela meant practically the same thing. Lope de Vega, the giant of Spanish drama, praised Espinel and helped canonise the pattern.
The Golden Age playwrights then gave the décima a prestigious job: the introspective lament. In seventeenth century Spanish verse drama, different stanza forms signalled different registers, and décimas were the conventional vehicle for a character alone on stage, reasoning through sorrow. The most famous example is the opening monologue of Calderón's play Life Is a Dream, from 1635, in which the imprisoned prince Segismundo questions why his greatest crime was being born. Spanish schoolchildren still learn stretches of it by heart.
The Décima Crosses the Atlantic
Spanish colonisation carried the décima to the Americas, where it did something remarkable: it went folk. Farmers, fishermen, and travelling singers adopted the ten-line stanza as a vessel for news, satire, devotion, and flirtation, transmitting it by voice rather than print. Each region grew its own musical setting and its own name for the practice.
The spread is worth spelling out, because the décima may be the most widely naturalised stanza in the hemisphere:
Improvisation and the Pie Forzado
The purest test of a decimista is repentismo, live improvisation. In a classic contest format, the audience or a rival supplies a pie forzado, a forced foot: a single predetermined line, often strange or awkward, that must appear as the tenth and final line of the décima. The singer then has the length of a musical introduction to compose, in the head, nine lines of correct rhyme and syllable count that arrive at the imposed ending as though it were inevitable.
Watching this done well rearranges your sense of what memory and pattern can do. Two improvisers will trade décimas for an hour, answering each other's arguments verse for verse, keeping the espinela scheme without a pen in sight. The tradition passes from master to apprentice much as classical meters did elsewhere, and communities in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Canary Islands run schools devoted to it. The décima survives not as a museum piece but as a competitive sport.
The Glosa: The Décima's Grand Cousin
The décima also anchors a larger composite form, the glosa, beloved of Golden Age poets and revived by contemporary writers. A glosa opens by quoting a four-line stanza from another poet, called the cabeza or text. The poet then writes four décimas of commentary, and each décima must end with the next successive line of the borrowed quatrain: the first décima ends with line one, the second with line two, and so on.
The result is a formal act of homage, a poem in conversation with its source, where the borrowed lines land like bells at each stanza's close. If you enjoy forms that force dialogue with the tradition, the glosa is one of the most satisfying exercises available, and it quietly teaches the espinela four times over. Choose a public domain quatrain to gloss and the copyright question disappears entirely.
Writing a Décima in English
English can carry the form two ways. Purists count eight syllables per line, matching the Spanish octosílabo. Most English-language poets find iambic tetrameter, four beats per line, more natural to the language's stress rhythms; either choice is defensible if you hold it consistently. The real challenge is the rhyming: four sounds deployed ten times forces you toward common, flexible rhyme families, and pushes invention hard.
Here is the opening movement of an original example, showing the abba setup and the pivot: 'The tide goes out and takes the pier, / the gulls, the summer, and the noise. / What August lent us it destroys. / The town shrinks to a photograph here.' From that pause, a fifth line rhyming with 'pier' and 'here' would relaunch the stanza toward its six-line close. Draft the final line first; like the improvisers with their pie forzado, you will write better knowing where you must land.
What poets can take from this
- Write the tenth line first and treat it as your pie forzado; the whole stanza will aim better.
- Place a firm syntactic pause at the end of line four to honour the form's two-part logic.
- Choose rhyme sounds with big word families before you start; four sounds must cover ten lines.
- In English, pick syllable count or tetrameter beats and hold one standard all the way through.
- Read your draft aloud to a steady pulse; the décima was born to be sung and it shows.
- Try a glosa on a public domain quatrain to practise four espinelas in one project.
Try it yourself
Write a single décima, rhymed abbaaccddc, in which a market trader describes the one item on their stall that never sells and why they secretly keep stocking it.
Questions
How many syllables are in a décima line?
In the Spanish tradition, eight syllables per line, counted with Spanish rules about final stress. English adaptations either keep a strict eight-syllable count or use iambic tetrameter, four beats per line. Consistency matters more than which convention you choose.
What is the difference between a décima and a sonnet?
A sonnet has fourteen lines, usually in longer pentameter lines, while a décima has ten shorter ones. They share an architectural instinct: a setup section, a turn, and a driven ending. Some critics call the décima a compressed cousin of the sonnet, but the two traditions developed separately and the décima's strongest life has been oral and sung.
Is the décima still used today?
Very much so. Improvised décima singing remains a living practice across Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and the Canary Islands, with festivals, schools, and competitions. Contemporary page poets in both Spanish and English also continue to publish décimas and glosas.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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