Poetic Form: The Balassi Stanza

Balint Balassi was a 16^th century Renaissance lyricist who was the founder of modern Hungarian poetry and, interestingly, was the first author of Hungarian erotic poetry. His most well-known poetry involved his love of Anna Losonczi, whom was married but seemed to respond to his attention. After the death of her first husband, she remarried and his love for her went unrequited. Balassi enshrined her in verse when his pursuit of her failed.

In developing his form, Balassi took an existing format of three 19-syllable lines and split each line into thirds, adding recurring rhymes, to make stanzas of nine lines. The number of syllables in each line of the stanza still total 57: 6-6-7-6-6-7-6-6-7. Like many syllable-based poetry, there is no set meter required.

Balassi became known as using far better and more original rhymes in Hungarian than any other poet before him. His primary rhyming scheme was "a - a - b - c - c - b - d - d - b." Remember that in a rhyming pattern, lines ending in a sound designated by "a" only rhyme with other "a" lines, "b" lines only with other "b" lines, and so on.

Though many examples are single verses, there can be any number of Balassi stanzas in a poem. Balassi himself used many variations of his format in his religious poetry and in his erotic poems, and many contemporary poets have followed suit.

Example:

Fisherman's Task

How many times, I ask,
was a fisherman's task
to clean the catch of the day
upon this lakeside dock
by barely four o'clock,
well before the skies turned gray?
The handle of the pump
would jitter, clack and thump,
to wash that night's fish buffet.