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Monk’s Tale stanza
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Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
A Study of Poetry
4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
Poetry: First Lines
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stanza
Spenserian stanza
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Monk’s Tale stanza

prosody
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History

Monk’s Tale stanza, a stanza of eight five-stress lines with the rhyme scheme ababbcbc. The type was established in “The Monk’s Tale” from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. It bears some similarity to the French ballade form and is one of the forms thought to have influenced the Spenserian stanza.