Nine Lives End in a Stanza Break

In poetry, the stanza a group of lines separated from other lines by a space. In traditional poetic forms, stanzas may be arranged in definite patterns, but in free verse, poets may use a variety of stanza forms and lengths within a single poem. In free verse, stanza breaks are important decisions for poets. They affect the meaning of a poem, as well as its appearance and sound.

Breaks between stanzas also indicate a pause when the poem is read, and the pause may be filled with unspoken and perhaps ineffable things. For example, if you have ever had to euthanize a pet you will immediately grasp, as I did, the flash of emotion packed into the break between the two stanzas of this poem by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins:

Putting Down the Cat by Billy Collins

The assistant holds her on the table,

The fur hanging limp from her tiny skeleton,

And the veterinarian raises the needle of fluid

Which will put the line through her ninth life.

"Painless," he reassures me, "like counting

backwards from a hundred," but I want to tell him

that our poor cat cannot count at all,

much less backwards, much less to a hundred.

If you are a cat lover, that brief stanzaic pause is filled with meaning. In that moment, with the needle raised, your heart leaps forward to grasp the poor cat but me your intellect tells you that nothing can be done, that the decision has been made, that it was made by someone else, that it was probably the right decision, and that it's only a poem anyway. The break passes in a flash, the poem picks back up, the needle is in, and it is too late.

I have heard Billy Collins read his poetry on several occasions. After one reading I told him that his poetry had often made me laugh, and that only the stanza break in Putting Down the Cat had ever made me cry. His measured reply, almost evasive in its terseness, was simply that after a lightening-brief pause, the veterinarian had lowered the needle and said exactly that: "painless, like counting backwards from a hundred." I think even Billy Collins could not adequately express what had transpired in that moment of hesitation; and thus, the power of the stanzaic pause.