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
Decasyllabic quatrain decasyllabic quatrain contains a stiffness that can not be overcome: You can not vary your stops, as in blank verse or the Spenserian, there is not room enough: and the recurrent divisions necessatated by the stanza lack at once the conciseness and the continuity of the couplet, the variety and amplitude of the rhyme-royal, octave, or Spenserian itself. In his essay on "Annus Mirabilis", A. W. Ward suggests that the decasyllabic quatrain used by Davenant and Dryden, with its insistence on providing each quatrain with the "completeness" given by the final period, causes the verse to strike the reader as