Glossary of Poetic Terms

A four-line stanza, often with various rhyme schemes, including:

    -ABAC or ABCB (known as unbounded or ballad quatrain), as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Sadie and Maud” by Gwendolyn Brooks.
    -AABB (a double couplet); see A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” 
    -ABAB (known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic), as in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
    -ABBA (known as envelope or enclosed), as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” or John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.”
    -AABA, the stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Browse poems with quatrains.