Quatrain

A quatrain is a poem or a stanza within a poem that consists of four lines. It is the most common of all stanza forms in European poetry.

There are five basic patterns that stanzas fall into. These are:

a) abab (from "The Unquiet Grave")

"The wind doth blow today, my love

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true-love

In cold grave she was lain.

b) xbyb (from "The Wife of Usher's Well")

There lived a wife at Usher's Well,

And a wealthy wife was she;

She had three stout and stalwart sons,

And sent them oer the sea.

c) aabb (from William Blake, "The Tyger")

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

d) abba, or the envelope stanza (from Tennyson In Memoriam)

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believeing where we cannot prove;

e) aaxa, or the Omar Khayyám stanza (also known as Rubaiyat)

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night,

Has flung the Stone that puts the stars to flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of light.

Other forms of stanzas include:

a) the heroic stanza or elegiac stanza (iambic pentameters rhyming abab; from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard")

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

b) ballad meter (the examples from "The Unquiet Grave" and "The Wife of Usher's Well" are both examples of ballad meter")

c) various hymns employ specific forms, such as the common meter, long meter, and short meter.