Lesson 6 | Text Structures: Poetry
[2] Combine Lines into Stanzas
After you have divided and indented lines, they need to be combined into stanzas.
- Divide lines
- Combine lines into stanzas
- Group stanzas into blocks
How can you tell which lines are meant to be read together with others, and which are not? In other words, how can you discern the presence of a monocolon, a bicolon, a tricolon, or a quatrain?
Look for Stanza Signals
Don't assume that verse numbers are correct: a numbered verse may contain a stanza, but one verse may contain multiple stanzas, and stanzas can spill over across verses.
Instead, look for signals of line combinations.¹ The author signals which lines should be read together in several different ways.
1. Ellipsis
A verb used in one line could be assumed in the next line.
For example, in Psalm 126:2, the verb יִמָּלֵ֪א is assumed in the second line.
2. Repetition
This could be a word, a phrase, or a whole line.
In Psalm 9:10, notice that the noun מִשְׂגָּב is repeated in the second line. (There is also ellipsis here: the second line is governed by וִ֘יהִ֤י, just like the first.)
3. Dependence
A second line could be giving the reason for the first, or the purpose, or simply be unpacking some element of the first. (Those who have studied Arcing will be helped by our Arcing the Psalms course. For example, the lesson on Psalm 22 explains different relationships lines have, using Arcing language.)
The second line in Psalm 119:7 below gives the time in which the first line will take place.
4. Matching
The syntactical structure could be copied from the first line to the second. For instance, the word order of both lines in Ecclesiastes 1:15 is substantive > negated imperfect verb > infinitive construct.
Watching for signals is similar to watching for parallelism. However, we’ve chosen not to use the word “parallelism” here since, as DeRouchie and Garrett tell us, “[p]arallelism is very common in Hebrew poetry, but it should not be considered to be the essence of Hebrew poetry. It is not a necessary feature of a Hebrew poem.”²
Marking Stanzas
- Add spaces between stanzas To show where a stanza begins and ends, add a space at the end of each stanza. (We asked you to do this in the previous assignment, so you should already be familiar with how to do so.)
- Indent subordinate lines Subordinate lines in a stanza should be indented. This will normally be the second line, since second lines are usually dependent on first lines, as we saw above.