Lesson 6 | Text Structures: Poetry
[3] Group Stanzas into Blocks
Finally, once you have divided up a discourse block of poetry into lines and connected them into stanzas, look for more large-scale connections.
- Divide lines
- Combine lines into stanzas
- Group stanzas into blocks
What to Look For...
There are many devices used in poetry: wordplay adds color and imagery communicates emotion. But in this lesson, we’re focusing on poetic elements that reveal a poem’s structure.
A whole poem could be divided into many stanzas, but those stanzas could be connected into small discourse blocks based on several factors. What should you look for when combining stanzas?
1. Repeated words and statements across stanzas
Words can be repeated not just from the first line of a stanza to a second but from one stanza to another, which reveals a connection the author is trying to make.
For example, verse 11 repeats verse 5 exactly. In my analysis, this stanza marks the conclusion of two larger blocks, verses 4-5 and 6-11.
2. A chiastic structure
As we explain here in our “Arcing the Psalms” course, a chiasm is “a poetic structure in which successive units of thought are mirrored by subsequent units.” You can find chiasms on both a micro- and macro-level.
So, in Psalm 2:10, after the adverb עַתָּה, the order is noun > verb, followed by verb > noun.
A chiasm subtly emphasizes the elements at its center. So, for example, in the verse above, the emphasis is on the command.
There is a macro-chiasm in Genesis 11, which Allen Ross outlines as follows:¹
A All the earth had one language (וַֽיְהִ֥י כָל־הָאָ֖רֶץ שָׂפָ֣ה אֶחָ֑ת) (1)
B there (שָֽׁם) (2)
C one to another (אֶל־רֵעֵ֗הוּ) (3)
D Come, let’s make bricks (הָ֚בָה נִלְבְּנָ֣ה לְבֵנִ֔ים) (3)
E Let’s make for ourselves (נִבְנֶה־לָּ֣נוּ) (4)
F a city and a tower (ʿעִ֗יר וּמִגְדָּל֙) (4)
G And the Lord came down to see (וַיֵּ֣רֶד יְהוָ֔ה לִרְאֹ֥ת) (5)
F′ the city and the tower (ʾאֶת־הָעִ֖יר וְאֶת־הַמִּגְדָּ֑ל) (5)
E′ that the humans built (אֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּנ֖וּ בְּנֵ֥י הָאָדָֽם) (5)
D′ Come, let’s confuse (הָ֚בָה … וְנָבְלָ֥ה) (7)
C′ everyone the language of his neighbor (אִ֖ישׁ שְׂפַ֥ת רֵעֵֽהוּ) (7)
B′ from there (מִשָּׁ֖ם) (8)
A’ (confused) the language of the whole earth (שְׂפַ֣ת כָּל־הָאָ֑רֶץ) (9)
What is the heart of this chiasm? The action of God that transforms everything in verse 5 (point G).
Our choice of using prose for a macro-level chiasm shows that chiasms can also be found in that genre.
3. An acrostic structure
As we describe here, also in our “Arcing the Psalms” course, an acrostic is made up of “poetic units (lines, pairs of lines, or whole stanzas) [that] begin with letters in the alphabetic sequence.”
Notice the first letter of each verse in Lamentations 1: they follow the order of the Hebrew alphabet.
In fact, the first four chapters of Lamentations are acrostics: chapters 1, 2, and 4 have verse 1 beginning with א, and each subsequent verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but chapter 3, at the heart of the book, has the first three verses beginning with א, and then groups of three verses begin with subsequent letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Whew! You’ve absorbed a lot of information on poetry. Before you put it to practice in the assignment, let’s worship the Lord with a psalm that displays some macro structure with idential first and final lines: הַ֥לְלוּ יָ֨הּ!