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
Burns stanza lyrical, subsequent uses have tended to be comic and satirical, as this passage from Burns shows: A variation on the Burns stanza employs the rhyme scheme AABCCCB, with foreshortened third and seventh lines. This form is deployed, for example, in W. H. Auden's poem "Brother, who when the sirens roar" (also known as "A Communist to Others"): Brothers, who when the sirens roar From office, shop and factory pour By cops directed to the fug Of talkie-houses for a drug, Or down canals to find a hug Auden uses similar verse forms in other poems in the collection "Look, Stranger!"