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
Sapphic stanza in Polish poetry from the book "Kanikuła, albo psia gwiazda" ("Canicula or dog star"). Zbigniew Morsztyn shaped his Sapphic stanzas so as to make a long chain of linked strophes, exhibiting many enjambments from one to the next stanza. He is the author of the poem "Sławna wiktoryja nad Turkami" ("The Famous Victory over the Turks"), which is an example of the use of the Sapphic stanza in an epic function. Large parts of Klemens Bolesławiusz's "Przeraźliwe echo trąby ostatecznej" ("The Horrifying Echo of Doomsday Trumpet") are composed in Sapphic stanzas. This work, which can be compared to "The Revelation of St. John"