(1) The hymn stanza grew out of the ballad stanza: four beats, three beats, four beats, three beats in alternating isochronous lines of varying numbers of syllables locked in a rhyming quatrain .(2) The reply and counter-reply must be given in the form of a quatrain with a rhyme scheme of a-b-c-b.(3) Valery subtly suggests the progression of evening in the language of the second quatrain 's closing lines.(4) Imagine hearing the lines of the second quatrain as a series of introductions.(5) By the time he has finished the first stanza, this is the form he seems to have chosen: a three-stress-per-line stanza of four lines, a quatrain in which the second and fourth lines rhyme.(6) Also of note formally are a few poems with blippy little quatrains of one to two words per line, one of which is the frolicsome ÔÇÿLeopard Spirit SocietyÔÇÖ.(7) As well as writing in free verse, his poems are often structured in two or three-line stanzas or quatrains , frequently, although not always, with a rhyme scheme.(8) The source texts are then reformed into single aphoristic lines, couplets, quatrains , and whole poems.(9) Ballads are most often first-person narratives told in rhyming quatrains of Hiberno-English, and dealing with matters such as love and war.(10) Presumably to save space, verse is cited in two parallel columns, read across rather than down, with the effect that ÔÇÿThe Character of a Happy LifeÔÇÖ appears at first glance to be written in obscure couplets rather than limpid quatrains .(11) Narrative folk ballads of Mexican origin typically have regular metrical features such as rhyming quatrains and use traditional imagery.(12) O'Hara has divided the poem into four unrhymed quatrains , with each of first three consisting of one self-contained sentence.(13) Smith's ÔÇÿillegitimateÔÇÖ sonnet consists of three elegiac quatrains and a couplet, thus combining both English elegiac meters.(14) We hear iambs, trochees, Virgil's hexameters, the Norse alliterative lines, each arranged in their various couplets, quatrains , choric stanzas, gnomic verses, and much more besides.(15) His earlier work tends to be written in traditional rhymed quatrains but, as he matured, he dropped the rhymes and worked in a freer but still basically alexandrine movement.(16) I curled up with Nash's couplets, quatrains , limericks and occasional jeremiads.
