Edmund Spenser composed The Faerie Queene in stanzas of eight lines of iambic pentameter, ending with an iambic hexameter or Alexandrine as a ninth line, and rhyming ababbcbcc, which became known as the Spenserian stanza. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the form enjoyed a revival, perhaps coinciding with the vogue for things medieval, and many of the English Romantic poets used it, notably Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Keats in "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Shelley in "Adonais." Tennyson demolished it in the course of "The Lotus Eaters," allowing the disintegration of the form to serve as a metaphor of the demoralization of the drugged sailors in that poem. John Updike employed it in one of the very few poems ever published in the Scientific American, "The Dance of the Solids."

The Spenserian stanza seems derived from the ballade, though it also resembles Chaucer's Monk's Tale stanza and is not too distant from rime royal.

                            Oh! for a seat on Appalachia's brow,
                            That I might scan the glorious prospect round,
                            Wild waving woods, and rolling floods below,
                            Smooth level glades and fields with grain embrown'd,
                            High heaving hills, with tufted forests crown'd,
                            Rearing their tall tops to the heaven's blue dome,
                            And emerald isles, like banners green unwound,
                            Floating along the lake, while round them roam
                            Bright helms of billowy blue and plumes of dancing foam.
                                                --Joseph Rodman Drake

                              ST Agnes' Eve---Ah, bitter chill it was!
                                The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
                                The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
                                And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
                                Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
                                His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
                                Like pious incense from a censer old,
                                Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
                            Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
                                                                                    --John Keats

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
                                                        --Percy Bysshe Shelley

            THE day had been a day of wind and storm;--
                  The wind was laid, the storm was overpast,--
            And stooping from the zenith, bright and warm
                  Shone the great sun on the wide earth at last.
                  I stood upon the upland slope and cast
            My eye upon a broad and beauteous scene,
                  Where the vast plain lay girt by mountains vast,
            And hills o'er hills lifted their heads of green,
            With pleasant vales scooped out and villages between.
                                        --William Cullen Bryant

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