for his Prophecy of Dante and by William Morris for his Guinevere. Alfred Noyes' Progress of Love also is in this form. Terza rima is employed for long poems-usually narratives of a serious tone.

To handle terza rima well requires skill in phrasing. The sense should run over the line a great deal, and the full stops should rarely occur at the end of the first line of a group, for this phrasing gives the impression of a quatrain. The following example of terza rima, is from Byron's Prophecy of Dante:

Many are poets who have never penned

Their inspiration, and perchance the best;

They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend
Their thoughts to meaner beings; they compressed
The God within them, and rejoined the stars,
Unlaurelled upon earth, but far more blessed
Than those who are degraded by the jars

Of Passion, and their frailties linked to fame,
Conquerors of high renoun, but full of scars.

Shelley invented a modification of terza rima for his Ode to the West Wind. This poem is grouped in four parts, each composed of four tercets of terza rima concluded by a couplet.

The quatrain is in most frequent use of any stanza form. It may be composed of lines in any meter, and of many combinations of meters. It may be rimed abab, xaya, abba, aabb, aaba. The following pages give examples of many of its possible types.

A few random examples in the shorter meters are:

Throw away thy rod

Throw away thy wrath;

O my God,

Take the gentle path.

(George Herbert: Discipline.)

And his eyes with tears are red,

And pale his lips as the dead.

(Swinburne: Love Laid His Sleepless Head.)

I dare not ask a kiss,

I dare not beg a smile,

Lest having that, or this,

I might grow proud the while.

(Herrick: To Electra.)

The short meter of the Church Hymnal is the two line "poulter's measure," an example of which was quoted on page 31, broken up into four lines. The first, second, and fourth are trimeter, and the third is tetrameter. They are rimed xaya, or abab:

The King Himself comes near

And feasts his saints to-day;

Here may we seek and see Him here,

And love, and praise and pray.

(Isaac Watts.)

Tennyson has used this stanza with trochaic lines:

Read my little fable:

He that runs may read.

Most can raise the flowers now,

For all have got the seed.

(Tennyson: Flower.)

Trimeter combined with a third line of pentameter also

occurs:

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea.

(Tennyson: Crossing the Bar.)

The most frequently used of all quatrains is the common meter of the Hymnal. This is tetrameter alternating with trimeter:

O Lord, be with us when we sail

Upon the lonely deep,

Our guard when on the silent deck
The nightly watch we keep.

(E. A. Dayman.)

This form, that has its origin among the people, has been used for countless hymns, ballads, and simple songs. Two other examples of it may be quoted:

There lived a wife at Usher's well,

And a wealthy wife was she;

And had three stout and stalwart sons,

And sent them o'er the sea.

(Wife of Usher's Well.)

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow will be dying.

(Herrick: To the Virgins.)

The long meter of the Hymnal, four tetrameter lines rimed xaya, or abab, has also been much used for simple themes:

Annan water's wading deep,

And my love Annie's wondrous bonny;

And I am laith she suld weet her feet,
Because I love her best of ony.

(Annan Water.)

He rose at dawn and, fired with hope,
Shot o'er the seething harbor-bar,

And reach'd the ship and caught the rope,
And whistled to the morning star.

(Tennyson: Sailor Boy.)

It has been used with a trochaic rhythm occasionally in the

When the tetrameter quatrain is rimed abba it is known as the In Memoriam stanza, from Tennyson's use of it in his great elegy, e. g.

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we that have not seen thy face,
By faith and faith alone embrace,

Believing when we cannot prove.

(Tennyson: In Memoriam.)

It had been used before by Ben Jonson, in an elegy, and by Rossetti in My Sister's Sleep, but the fame of Tennyson's poem has caused the form to be associated with his name. Professor Corson's comment admirably describes the stanza: "By the rime-scheme of the quatrain, the terminal rime-emphasis of the stanza is reduced, the second and third verses being the most closely braced by the rime. The stanza is thus admirably adapted to that sweet continuity of flow, free from abrupt checks, demanded by the spiritualA Primer of English Verse, pp. 70 ff.

ized sorrow which it bears along. Alternate rime would have wrought an entire change in the tone of the poem. To be assured of this one should read, aloud, of course, all the stanzas whose first and second, or third and fourth, verses admit of being transposed without affecting the sense. By such transposition, the rimes are made alternate, and the concluding rimes more emphatic." Two stanzas which admit of this change are,

Old yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the underlying dead,
Thy fibers net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

(II, 1.)

I feel it when I sorrow most,

"Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.

(XXVII, 4.)

As illustrations of the adaptability of the stanza, because of the reduction of terminal emphasis, to an uninterrupted flow of thought and feeling, Professor Corson quotes sections XII and LXXXVI.

Other ways of riming the tetrameter quatrain are ɑaxa:
O love, what hours were thine and mine,

In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange blossom,

Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine,

and aabb:

(Tennyson: Daisy.)

If Rosamond that was so fair,

Had cause her sorrows to declare,

Then let Jane Shore with sorrow sing,

That was beloved of a king.

(Ballad of Jane Shore.)