Poetic Form
Spenserian Stanza
Spenser created the stanza for The Faerie Queene (1590). Its interlocking rhymes and closing alexandrine create a sense of accumulated grandeur and dreamy suspension.
Definition
A nine-line stanza rhyming ABABBCBCC, the final line an alexandrine (iambic hexameter), invented by Edmund Spenser.
Example
Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590); Keats' 'The Eve of St. Agnes'; Shelley's 'Adonais'; Byron's Childe Harold.