A Prayer for My Daughter its "metremes", or rhymical motifs, rather than common metrical devices. The poem also may be read to consist of straightforward iambic verse that relies on common metrical devices such as elision, acephalous lines, promotion, and metrical inversion. Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 of each stanza are iambic pentameter; lines 4, 6, and 7 are iambic tetrameter. For instance, using traditional principles of scansion, stanza two may be scanned as shown below, where syllables in all caps represent metrical beats, lower-case syllables represent metrical off-beats, the vertical bar represents the termination of a metrical foot, and apostrophes represent elisions.
Sapphic stanza in Polish poetry Sapphic ones. Only the last one is made up of four hendecasyllabic lines. All strophes rhyme ABAB. The Sapphic stanza is still used in translations form Sappho's or Horace's poems. The scheme of Sapphic stanza is so recognizable, that it can be preserved even in free verse. Lucylla Pszczołowska points out that Czesław Miłosz sometimes composed four-line stanzas with last line of five syllables and other lines of different length. The Sapphic stanza's scheme was so attractive to Polish poets that they started to modify it, and many stanzas based on it can be found in Polish literature. Already in