Decasyllabic quatrain famous poets such as Thomas Gray continued to use the form in works such as "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". Shakespearean Sonnets, comprising 3 quatrains of iambic pentameter followed by a final couplet, as well as later poems in blank verse have displayed the various uses of the decasyllabic quatrain throughout the history of English Poetry. The decasyllabic quatrain with an alternating rhyme scheme is often referred to as the "heroic quatrain", the "heroic stanza" or the "four-line stave". It came to prominence in the poem "Nosce Teipsum" by Sir John Davies in 1599. Although the use of ten-syllable
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!"