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
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