Well versed on stanzas
QUESTION
In poetry, the terms verse and stanza are often synonymous.
Verse is either a definite number of lines of poetry or a general term for a poetic composition. It is also often used to refer to work of a slightly lower standard than poetry. In a song, a verse is simply a section that’s often followed by a chorus.
Stanza, meanwhile, refers to a formally defined unit of a poem. to identify a stanza, count the number of lines: a couplet is two lines; a tercet, three; quatrain, four; cinquain, five; sestet, six — sometimes called a sexain; septet, seven; and octave, eight.
over the centuries, poets have evolved many specific stanza forms, some of which carry the name of the poet who invented them, such as the petrarchan sonnet, the Spenserian stanza or the Burns stanza.
Many of Burns’s poems used a six-line, tail-rhyme stanza with an a-a-a-b-a-b scheme; the fourth and sixth lines being shorter than the rest, such as in to A Mouse: Alan Bould, Edinburgh. QUESTION When my father used to make ginger beer, he used a ginger beer plant. What is that? FUrtHer to the earlier answer, my late grandmother always had a ginger beer ‘plant’.
It consisted of yeast, caster sugar, grated ginger and warm water so a slow fermentation took place. every couple of days, the plant had to be ‘fed’ with more sugar and ginger.
She would often pass some of the drink to neighbours. It was, I recall, a most efficacious cure for morning sickness. When my dad was suffering from cancer, during his chemotherapy he was given regular glasses of ginger wine. Jimmy Munday, Shotley, Suffolk.