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
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