Quatrain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
In its narrow meaning, the term is restricted to a complete poem consisting of only four lines. In its broader sense, it includes any one of many four-verse stanza form.
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[edit] Basic forms
- Yulian Pavlyuk
Wabbajack
The slimly creature shy and big
The hundred eyes looking into the night
It seems to have stepped across a twig.
The night lighting the clear and bright
Yet if the creature saw the sunshine shine
Oh the terror it would cause
The problem I hope would not be mine
I just hope you wouldn't have to see between it's jaws
Slowly the Wabbajack crept up the distant hills
The horizon with the sky
Appearing before the broken mills
It let out a loud, shrill cry
The creature was close to its swampy home
Just ahead it saw the puddle
Were lay its slimy, magical rounded dome
It went inside and fell into a deep cuddle
- 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.
- 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 slept with them out at sea.
- 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?
- abba, also called the envelope stanza or introverted quatrain (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;
- 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.
[edit] Other forms
- The heroic stanza or elegiac stanza (iambic pentameter, 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.
- The Shichigon-zekku form used in Chinese and Japanese poetry. Both rhyme and rhythm are key elements, although the former is not restricted to falling at the end of the phrase.
- Ballad meter (The examples from "The Unquiet Grave" and "The Wife of Usher's Well" are both examples of ballad meter.)
- Various hymns employ specific forms, such as the common meter, long meter, and short meter.
[edit] See also
- Nostradamus, writer of prophetic quatrains
[edit] External links
- Poetic Form of Quatrain: A Research Note by Dr Manouchehr Saadat Noury.
