Metre (poetry) of over some two-and-a-half millennia. Beginning with the earlier recorded forms: the Classic of Poetry tends toward couplets of four-character lines, grouped in rhymed quatrains; and, the Chuci follows this to some extent, but moves toward variations in line length. Han Dynasty poetry tended towards the variable line-length forms of the folk ballads and the Music Bureau yuefu. Jian'an poetry, Six Dynasties poetry, and Tang Dynasty poetry tend towards a poetic metre based on fixed-length lines of five, seven, (or, more rarely six) characters/verbal units tended to predominate, generally in couplet/quatrain-based forms, of various total verse lengths. The Song poetry
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"