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 or Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, was extremely popular and appeared in eighteen editions from 1670 to 1886. It is another example of the Sapphic stanza serving an epic function in Old Polish literature. The Sapphic stanza was also used in Poland during Enlightenment. Poets of the time preferred the Polish alexandrine (7+6) to the hendecasyllable (5+6), but used the latter metre in Italian forms, such as sesta rima and ottava rima, as well as in Sappho's stanza. Sapphic stanzas can be found in Adam Naruszewicz's poetry. He used the form among others in the poem "Pieśń doroczna na dzień ocalenia