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
Portrait of a Lady (poem) Portrait of a Lady (poem) "Portrait of a Lady" is a poem by American-British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), first published in September 1915 in ". " It was published again in March 1916 in "Others: An Anthology of the New Verse," in February 1917 (without the epigraph) in "The New Poetry: An Anthology," and finally in his 1917 collection of poems, "Prufrock and Other Observations." The poem's title is widely seen to be derived from the novel of the same name by Henry James. The poem's epigraph is a famous quotation from Christopher Marlowe's play "The Jew of Malta":