Fourteener (poetry) with Fourteeners, to form a poem of 12 and 14 syllable lines. It was often used in the Elizabethan era. The term was coined by George Gascoigne, because poulters, or poulterers (sellers of poultry), would sometimes give 12 to the dozen, and other times 14 (see also Baker's dozen). When the poulter's measure couplet is divided at its caesurae, it becomes a short measure stanza, a quatrain of 3, 3, 4, and 3 feet. Examples of this form are Nicholas Grimald's "A Truelove"; Lord Brooke's "Epitaph on Sir Phillip Sydney"; Nicholas Breton's "Phyllis" in the Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century
A Prayer for My Daughter quatrain of enclosed rhyme. Many of the rhyme pairs use slant rhyme. The stanza may be seen as a variation on ottava rima, an eight-lined stanza used in other Yeats poems, such as "Among School Children" and "Sailing to Byzantium." Metrical analysis of the poem, according to Robert Einarsson, proves difficult because he believes Yeats adheres to "rhythmical motifs" rather than traditional use of syllables in his meter. In stanza two, Einarsson points out instances where the meter of the poem contains examples of amphibrachic, pyrrhicretic, and spondaic feet. He argues that the complexity of Yeats's verse follows patterns of