Decasyllabic quatrain

Decasyllabic quatrain is a term used for a poetic form in which each stanza consists of four lines of ten syllables each, usually with a rhyme scheme of AABB or ABAB. Examples of the decasyllabic quatrain in heroic couplets appear in some of the earliest texts in the English language, as Geoffrey Chaucer created the heroic couplet and used it in The Canterbury Tales. The alternating form came to prominence in late 16th-Century English poetry and became fashionable in the 17th Century when it appeared in heroic poems by William Davenant and John Dryden. In the 18th Century famous poets such as Thomas Gray continued to use the form in works such as "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".Shakespearean Sonnets, comprising 3 quatrains of iambic pentameter followed by a final couplet, as well as later poems in blank verse have displayed the various uses of the decasyllabic quatrain throughout the history of English Poetry.

The decasyllabic quatrain with an alternating rhyme scheme is often referred to as the "heroic quatrain", the "heroic stanza" or the "four-line stave". It came to prominence in the poem Nosce Teipsum by Sir John Davies in 1599. Although the use of ten-syllable lines had existed long before Davies's poems, the most common usage for the decasyllabic form was in the heroic couplet, where two lines of iambic pentameter were composed with a rhyme scheme that caused the vowel sound at the end of each line to correspond with the vowel sound of the line immediately following it. Hence, a quatrain formed of heroic couplets would have a scheme of AABB. However, Nosce teipsum used a variation of the form wherein the couplets were separated by interjected lines, causing the scheme to gain complexity.

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