Decasyllabic quatrain 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
Verse (poetry) is too pedestrian or too incompetent to be classed as poetry. Blank verse is poetry written in regular, metrical, but unrhymed, lines, almost always composed of iambic pentameters. <poem> </poem> Free verse is usually defined as having no fixed meter and no end rhyme. Although free verse may include end rhyme, it commonly does not. <poem> </poem> Verse (poetry) In the countable sense, a verse is formally a single metrical line in a poetic composition. However, verse has come to represent any division or grouping of words in a poetic composition, with groupings traditionally having been referred to as stanzas.