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
Verse novel verse novel is the Onegin stanza, invented by Pushkin in "Eugene Onegin". It is an adapted form of the Shakespearean sonnet, retaining the three quatrains plus couplet structure but reducing the metre to iambic tetrameter and specifying a distinct rhyme scheme: the first quatrain is cross-rhymed (ABAB), the second couplet-rhymed ("CCDD"), and the third arch-rhymed (or chiasmic, EFFE), so that the whole is ABABCCDDEFFEGG. Additionally, Pushkin required that the first rhyme in each couplet (the A, C, and E rhymes) be unstressed (or "feminine"), and all others stressed (or "masculine"). In the rhyme scheme notation capitalizing masculine rhymes, this reads