ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the structure of stanzaic poems by determining the logical relations among their stanzas, which are regarded as basic units. It shows that aspects of stanzaic and poetic closure have to be approached with considerable circumspection. The interpreter who is thoroughly convinced of his theory may easily lapse into a distorting explication. A poem containing only mobile stanzas belongs to a different structural category. Whereas its individual stanzas are all tightly closed, the whole poem is basically open. The strong-stimulus is as extensive as that in section 86 of In Memoriam. The poem’s structure seems to resemble that of Percy B. Shelley’s ‘Conclusion’; but William Blake’s composition is more rigorously stanzaic than Shelley’s, because its strong-stimulus is set up differently. The overall structure of the poems is quite different. The earlier poem shows that the principles of stanzaic mobility and retrospective linkage can be embedded in, and subordinated to, a priori progression; the strong-stimulus constitutes the primary unit.
