Shapes of Time: On the Spenserian Stanza

The Spenserian stanza is the poet’s chief engine for organizing the ongoing, ever-expanding movement of his allegorical poem, an emblem of his attempt to order time and to discover the emergent orders of time, something exemplified in this essay by a crucial stanza from the Garden of Adonis, which shows well the form’s intricacy and generosity, its power of continuity and transformation. The essay ends by juxtaposing this stanza form to that of Donne’s unfinished satiric poem of 1601, Metempsychosis, a work which adapts Spenser’s stanza in a way that supports the poem’s strange, often grotesque rethinking of the Spenserian vision of life and human creation as they exist in time.