Sapphic stanza in Polish poetry for Renaissance poets. Horace's Sapphic stanza comprised three "lesser sapphics" and an "adonic": In Polish there was no quantitative verse, as phonemic quantity itself was extinct. Nor was there accentual-syllabic versification, save some attempts by Jan Kochanowski. But Polish syllabic lines were available. A syllabic hendecasyllable 11(5+6) took the place of the quantitative lesser sapphic; likewise with the adonic. The hendecasyllable (with caesura after the fifth syllable) is very common in Polish poetry, and the pentasyllable is so typical for Polish verse that Karol Wiktor Zawodziński gave it the name of "polonik". Pentasyllables occur in Polish poetry either in a
Tercet the outer lines of the next stanza rhyme with the central line of the preceding stanza, BCB, as in the "terza rima" or "terzina" form of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. There has been much investigation of the possible sources of the Dantesque "terzina", which Benedetto Croce characterised as "linked, enclosed, disciplined, vehement and yet calm". William Baer observes of the tercets of terza rima, "These interlocking rhymes tend to pull the listener's attention forward in a continuous flow... Given this natural tendency to glide forward, terza rima is especially well-suited to narration and description". The tercet also forms part of