A River: How Many Stanzas Are There? Complete Answer

Introduction

The poem “A River” was written by A.K. Ramanujan, and it has four stanzas. The stanzas are uneven in length, containing 16, 11, 7, and 15 lines respectively — 49 lines in total. The poem is written in free verse, with no fixed rhyme scheme.

Before going further, it’s worth confirming the poem’s identity: several poems share short, generic titles like “A River,” so getting the poet right matters before trusting any stanza count.

Key Takeaways

• “A River” was written by A.K. Ramanujan, a major Indian poet and translator.
• The poem has four stanzas with 16, 11, 7, and 15 lines respectively — 49 lines total.
• It is written in free verse, with no fixed rhyme scheme.
• The setting is Madurai, centered on the Vaigai River’s dry and flood seasons.
• Stanzas 2 and 4 share a repeated, expanded description of the flood’s damage.
• The uneven stanza lengths mirror the river’s unpredictability and control the poem’s pacing.

Which Poem Is This? Identifying the Poet and Title

The focus keyword here “A River” most commonly refers to the poem written by A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993), a major Indian poet, translator, and folklorist known for work that blends Indian settings with a modern, often ironic sensibility. This is the version of “A River” that appears widely in Indian school and university literature syllabuses, and it’s the poem this article covers.

The poem is set in Madurai, a South Indian city known for its temples, and centers on the Vaigai River. Ramanujan uses the river’s yearly cycle, a dry trickle in summer, a destructive flood in the monsoon to criticize how poets, both old and new, romanticize the river’s floods in verse while ignoring the real human suffering the floods cause.

Stanza-by-Stanza Breakdown of “A River”

“A River” is divided into four stanzas of uneven length, rather than stanzas of matching size, a structural choice that mirrors the river’s own irregular, unpredictable behaviour.

Stanza	Number of Lines	Focus
Stanza 1	16 lines	Introduces Madurai and describes the river in its dry, summer state
Stanza 2	11 lines	Describes the river in flood, and the losses this causes
Stanza 3	7 lines	Shifts to how old poets have written about the river’s floods
Stanza 4	15 lines	Repeats and expands on the flood’s toll, criticizing new poets for merely imitating the old ones

That gives a total of 49 lines across 4 stanzas. The second and fourth stanzas are notably connected: the fourth stanza restates part of the second, with added detail — a deliberate repetition, not a mistake in the text.

Structure, Form, and Rhyme Scheme

“A River” is written in free verse. It does not follow a fixed rhyme scheme or a regular meter, which was a deliberate stylistic choice consistent with Ramanujan’s broader modernist style.

Instead of rhyme, the poem builds rhythm through repetition and consonance for example, repeated words like “sand” across neighboring lines, and clusters of similar consonant sounds. The most significant repeated element is the refrain-like restatement between stanzas 2 and 4, where the poet repeats the description of what the flood destroyed, adding new details the second time around.

How the Stanza Structure Shapes the Poem’s Meaning

The uneven stanza lengths aren’t just a formatting detail; they reinforce the poem’s argument.

The long first stanza (16 lines) lingers on the dry, unremarkable river, mirroring how ordinary and unpoetic the river actually looks most of the year. The shorter third stanza (7 lines) moves quickly through the old poets’ treatment of the floods, almost dismissively matching the speaker’s own irritation at how casually those poets handled real suffering. The return to a longer stanza (15 lines) at the end, repeating and expanding the flood’s toll, forces the reader to sit with the same loss twice, making the poem’s critique of poetic indifference land harder the second time.

In short: the stanza breaks aren’t neutral; they control pacing, and that pacing supports Ramanujan’s central point about the gap between poetic tradition and lived reality.

Exam-Ready Answer

Q: How many stanzas are there in the poem “A River”?
A: The poem “A River” by A.K. Ramanujan has four stanzas, containing 16, 11, 7, and 15 lines respectively (49 lines total). It is written in free verse with no fixed rhyme scheme, and the second and fourth stanzas share a repeated, expanded description of the flood’s damage.

Final Thoughts

To directly answer the question: the poem “A River,” written by A.K. Ramanujan, contains four stanzas of uneven length, totaling 49 lines and following no fixed rhyme scheme. That structural irregularity isn’t incidental; it reflects the river’s own unpredictable nature and reinforces the poem’s larger criticism of poets who reduce real human loss to a recurring, almost routine poetic subject.

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