A strophe () is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the

antistrophe Antistrophe ( grc, ἀντιστροφή, "a turning back") is the portion of an ode sung by the chorus in its returning movement from west to east, in response to the strophe, which was sung from east to west. Characteristics Usage as a li ...

and epode. The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing

stanza In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, but they are not required to have ei ...

s of varying line length. Strophic poetry is to be contrasted with poems composed line-by-line non-stanzaically, such as Greek epic poems or English

blank verse Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and Pa ...

, to which the term ''

stichic Poetry made up of lines of the same approximate meter and length, not broken up into stanzas, is called stichic (as opposed to stanzaic, e.g.). Most poetry from the Old English period is considered stichic. Most English poetry written in blank ver ...

'' applies. In its original Greek setting, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of

framed only for the music", as

John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem ''Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and politica ...

wrote in the preface to '' Samson Agonistes'', with the strophe chanted by a

Greek chorus A Greek chorus, or simply chorus ( grc-gre, χορός, chorós), in the context of ancient Greek tragedy, comedy, satyr plays, and modern works inspired by them, is a homogeneous, non-individualised group of performers, who comment with a collect ...

as it moved from right to left across the scene.

Etymology

Strophe (from

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

στροφή, "turn, bend, twist") is a concept in versification which properly means a turn, as from one

foot The foot ( : feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is a separate organ at the terminal part of the leg mad ...

to another, or from one side of a chorus to the other.

Poetic structure

In a more general sense, the strophe is a pair of

s of alternating form on which the structure of a given poem is based, with the strophe usually being identical with the stanza in modern poetry and its arrangement and recurrence of rhymes giving it its character. But the Greeks called a combination of verse-periods a system, giving the name "strophe" to such a system only when it was repeated once or more in unmodified form. A simple form of Greek strophe is the Sapphic strophe. Like all Greek verse, it is composed of alternating long and short syllables (symbolized by — for long, u for short and x for either long or short) in this case arranged in the following manner: — u — x — u u — u — — — u — x — u u — u — — — u — x — u u — u — x — u u — — Far more complex forms are found in the odes of

Pindar Pindar (; grc-gre, Πίνδαρος , ; la, Pindarus; ) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar ...

and the choral sections of Greek drama. In choral poetry, it is common to find the strophe followed by a metrically identical

, which may – in Pindar and other

epinician The ''epinikion'' or ''epinicion'' (plural ''epinikia'' or ''epinicia'', ancient Greek, Greek , from ''epi-'', "on," + ''Nike (mythology), nikê'', "victory") is a genre of occasional poetry also known in English language, English as a victory od ...

poets – be followed in turn by a metrically dissimilar epode, creating an ''AAB'' form.

Origins and development

It is said that

Archilochus Archilochus (; grc-gre, Ἀρχίλοχος ''Arkhilokhos''; c. 680 – c. 645 BC) was a Greek lyric poet of the Archaic period from the island of Paros. He is celebrated for his versatile and innovative use of poetic meters, and is the ...

first created the strophe by binding together systems of two or three lines. But it was the

ode-writers who introduced the practice of strophe-writing on a large scale, and the art was attributed to

Stesichorus Stesichorus (; grc-gre, Στησίχορος, ''Stēsichoros''; c. 630 – 555 BC) was a Greek lyric poet native of today's Calabria (Southern Italy). He is best known for telling epic stories in lyric metres, and for some ancient traditions abo ...

, although it is likely that earlier poets were acquainted with it. The arrangement of an ode in a splendid and consistent artifice of strophe,

and epode was carried to its height by

Variant forms

With the development of Greek prosody, various peculiar strophe-forms came into general acceptance, and were made celebrated by the frequency with which leading poets employed them. Among these were the ''Sapphic,'' the ''Elegiac,'' the ''Alcaic,'' and the ''Asclepiadean'' strophe, all of them prominent in Greek and Latin verse. The briefest and the most ancient strophe is the ''dactylic distych,'' which consists of two verses of the same class of rhythm, the second producing a melodic counterpart to the first.

Reproductions

The forms in modern English verse which reproduce most exactly the impression aimed at by the ancient ode strophe are the elaborate rhymed stanzas of such poems as

Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculos ...

' ''

Ode to a Nightingale "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also ...

'' or

Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, lit ...

's '' The Scholar-Gipsy''. A strophic form of poetry called Muwashshah developed in

Andalucia Andalusia (, ; es, Andalucía ) is the southernmost autonomous community in Peninsular Spain. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomous community in the country. It is officially recognised as a "historical nationality". The ...

as early as the 9th century CE, which then spread to North Africa and the Middle East. Muwashshah was typically in classical Arabic, with the refrain sometimes in the local dialect.

Contemporary usage

The term strophe is used in modern and post-modern criticism, to indicate "long non-isomorphic units".Page 1360, Entry 'STROPHE', The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition, edited by Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer The term "stanza s usedfor more regular ones" (ibid). This appropriation of the ancient term is useful, as contemporary poetry is a frequent turns (the original meaning of Strophe), and it avoids relying upon the invention of new terminology such as 'word clumps'.

References

Sources

* {{Authority control Ancient Greek theatre Poetic forms