Quatrain Quatrain A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines. Existing in a variety of forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China, and continues into the 21st century, where it is seen in works published in many languages. During Europe's Dark Ages, in the Middle East and especially Iran, polymath poets such as Omar Khayyam continued to popularize this form of poetry, also known as Ruba'i, well beyond their borders and time. Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus) used the
Sapphic stanza in Polish poetry their lyrical pieces. Sebastian Fabian Klonowic (known as Acernus) decided to employ the stanza in a longer epic poem. His "Flis, to Jest Spuszczanie Statków Wisłą i inszymi rzekami" ("The lightening or expediting barges on the Vistula river and other rivers") is because of its stanzaic form an exceptional work, perhaps not only in Polish literature. The whole poem is 471 stanzas long and probably no other work can be compared to it. Tobiasz Wiszniowski, who wrote his own sequence of "Laments", employed Sapphic stanza in "Tren XVII" (Lament XVII"). At the beginning of the Baroque, Kasper Miaskowski employed the