Poetry, which is sometimes called verse, is structured into stanzas. Stanzas are groups of lines that are comparable to paragraphs in prose. If you are "versed" in music, you know that songs are also divided into stanzas or verses.

Watch this video to review how stanzas fit together to provide structure to a poem.

Another way to think about stanzas is through an analogy. Stanza originated from the Italian word for room, so if stanzas are rooms, poems are houses. While all the rooms of a house combine to make a functional and beautiful domicile, all the stanzas of a poem combine to create meaningful and beautiful insight.

Just as rooms come in different sizes, so do stanzas. Stanzas of two lines are couplets, three lines are tercets, and four lines are quatrains. In "Emperor Penguins," the poet uses the common quatrain. While the regal birds are held together by body heat, the words in Polisar's poem are bound together by rhythm and rhyme.

Rhythm is the particular beat of the poem or the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Rhythm is such an important element of poetry that it merits its own lesson. However, the primary focus of this lesson is on the graphical elements, or the look, of poetry.

Rhyme (time, climb, sublime) is often used by poets to draw attention to the words at the end of the stanza. In "Emperor Penguins," there is an alternate rhyme scheme. The end of line two, sleet, rhymes with the end of line four, heat. Rhythm and rhyme patterns are usually consistent in a poem. If you notice alternate rhyme in the first stanza, you can usually expect the same pattern in stanzas two and three.

How do the three stanzas of Polisar's poem contribute to the overall meaning? In each of the stanzas, the poet presents an idea, building on the insight of the previous stanza. In the first stanza, Polisar paints a picture of birds huddling together to survive the freezing weather in Antarctica. The cold intensifies in the second stanza as the individual birds—unlike the emperors for which they are named—circle as a community, turning inward to outsmart the biting wind. In the last stanza, we understand why penguins must outwit the harsh climate: They need to insure that their species survives by protecting its eggs.

Images used in this section:

Source: Italian house, Evgeniy Isaev, Wikimedia Commons