Lesson 6 | Text Structures: Poetry
Introducing the Process
When dealing with Hebrew poetry, there is a threefold process to follow:
- Divide lines
- Combine lines into stanzas
- Group stanzas into blocks
We will explore each part of that process in this and the next three steps. But first we should remind you about discourse blocks from Lesson 2, and see how that impacts poetry.
Interpreting the Whole
As we explained here in Lesson 2, a "discourse block" is a structure made up of clauses. It could be as small as a paragraph, or as large as many paragraphs. When working with a poem, it is important to identify discourse blocks, just like it is with any other type of biblical literature, so we can interpret the text in a way that honors the way the original author communicated. As Dr. Jason DeRouchie explained it,
Whole texts, not just isolated words or clauses, supply the natural framework for verbal communication. While a text could be one clause (e.g., “YHWH is a consuming fire”) or even a single word (“Run!”), usually a text contains a sequence of clauses, whether short (an answer to a question) or long (a book).
Texts themselves often divide into discrete parts or self-contained literary packages, and biblical interpreters need to work with these whole units of thought.
—Jason S. DeRouchie, How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament: Twelve Steps from Exegesis to Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017), 101.
When working with poetry, a unit of thought, or a discourse block, would be an entire poem. So in the Psalms, interpreting poetry on the discourse block level means interpreting an entire psalm.
We can analyze a whole poem by means of its stanzas, and we can analyze the stanzas by means of its lines (ibid., 102). But what are stanzas and lines?
Lines and Stanzas
A line is basically a single clause. (We’ll explain this, and exceptions, in the next step.) And stanzas are built out of lines—lines that have a grammatical, syntactical, or thematic connection (we’ll explain this in a couple of steps).
You should also know that a line is often called a “colon” to categorize stanzas more easily: a stanza with one line is called a “monocolon,” a stanza with two lines a “bicolon”, and a stanza with three lines a “tricolon.” If there are four lines in a stanza, it is called a “quatrain.”
Usually, stanzas and verses coincide. But verse numbers may not always “accurately reflect the actual versification of a poem.”¹
Finally, stanzas may be combined into discourse blocks, based on syntactical or thematic elements. Identifying blocks is more subjective than identifying stanzas, although there is an element of art—not just science—in doing both.
So here is the structure of a poem from the bottom up:
line ⇨ stanza ⇨ block ⇨ poem
