Other kinds of verse can also of course form

rimed couplets (cp. § 228).

Stanzas of triplets are more common than stanzas

of couplets; e.g.:

And what's a Life?

a weary pilgrimage,
Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage
With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.
And what's a Life? the flourishing array
Of the proud summer meadow, which to day
Wears her green plush, and is to-morrow hay.

(Francis Quarles, The Shortness of Life.)
Tennyson (e.g. The Two Voices, a a a) and
Swinburne (cp. § 223) have three-line stanzas.
Tennyson has even an unrimed three-line stanza:
O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.
O were I thou that she might take me in,
And lay me on her bosom, and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.

(The Golden Treasury, Oxford Edition, Nr. 329.) The end of a stanza a a a is made more prominent when a fourth line is added as a refrain,

e.g.:

On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow;
And dark as winter was the flow

Of Iser, rolling rapidly.

(Campbell, Hohenlinden.)

The twentieth year is wellnigh past
Since first our sky was overcast;
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!

(Cowper, To Mary Unwin.)

Now simmer blinks on flowery braes,
And o'er the crystal streamlet plays,
Come let us spend the lightsome days
In the Birks of Aberfeldy.

(Burns, The Birks of Aberfeldy.) In Tennyson's Daisy the third verse does not rime (a a ba1):

What more? we took our last adieu,

And up the snowy Splugen drew,

But ere we reach'd the highest summit
I pluck'd a daisy, I gave it you,

Fitz Gerald's Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám (cp. § 150, 5), and Swinburne's Laus Veneris are similar, but Swinburne rimes the third verses of every two consecutive stanzas, so that really an eight-line stanza a abaccb c, arises; cp. ll. 1 ff.: Asleep or waking is it? for her neck

Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck

Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out; Soft, and stung softly fairer for a fleck.

But though my lips shut sucking on the place,

There is no vein at work upon her face;

Her eyelids are so peaceable, no doubt

Deep sleep has warmed her blood through all its ways.

$ 228. Poulter's Measure.

Poulter's Measure was much used in the sixteenth century. It is a rimed couplet consisting of an alexandrine (12 syllables) and a septenary

(14 syllables). It is so called "because the poulterer gives twelve for one dozen and fourteen for another". This metre was used by Wyatt, Surrey and others. It is found in sixteenth century drama and in a long narrative poem, Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet (1562), the chief source of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; cp. 2337 ff.:

The nurse departed once, the chamber door shut close
Assured that no living wight her doing might disclose,
She poured forth into the vial of the friar
Water, out of a silver ewer that on the board stood

by her.

The sleepy mixture made, fair Juliet doth it hide
Under her bolster soft, and so unto her bed she hied:
Where divers novel thoughts arise within her head,
And she is so environèd about with deadly dread;
That what before she had resolved undoubtedly,
That same she calleth into doubt;

and lying doubtfully,

Whilst honest love did strive with dread of deadly

pain,

With hands y-wrung, and weeping eyes, thus gan she to complain:

'What, is there any one, beneath the heavens high,
So much unfortunate as I? so much past hope as I?
What, am I not myself, of all that yet were born,
The deepest drenched in despair, and most in For
tune's scorn?

For lo, the world for me hath nothing else to find,
Beside mishap and wretchedness and anguish of the

mind;

Since that the cruel cause of my unhappiness
Hath put me to this sudden plunge, and brought to
such distress etc.

This couplet ceased to be used but Macaulay revives it; in Virginia the lines are printed as long lines, in Horatius we have ag bg c4 bg dg eg f4 08, cp. Horatius XVI:

Now, from the rock Tarpeian,

Could the wan burghers spy
The line of blazing villages
Red in the midnight sky.

The Fathers of the City,

They sat all night and day,

For every hour some horseman came
With tidings of dismay.

Occasionally an alexandrine is found in place of a septenary, or the stanza is extended to 9-12 lines.

NOTE. Another unlike rimed couplet as a b1 b2 etc. is used by Robert Herrick in A Thanksgiving for his House (Chambers' Cyclopaedia of Engl. Lit. I, 565):

Lord, thou hast given me a cell

Wherein to dwell,

A little house whose humble roof

Is weatherproof;

Under the spars of which I lie
Both soft and drie etc.

$229. Common Metre. (Ballad Stanza.) The four-line anisometrical stanza a bз c1 bз (§ 170), generally called common metre which results from splitting a septenary rimed couplet, was much used in NE. in popular ballads and similar poems; e.g.:

In somer when the shawes be shene

And leves be large and long,

Hit is full mery in feyre foreste

To here the foulys song.

(Robin Hood and the Monk.)

John Gilpin was a citizen

Of credit and renown,

A train-band captain eke was he

Of famous London town.

(Cowper, John Gilpin.)

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

(Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner.)

In The Ancient Mariner we also find many variations, e.g. a, b, c c, b, and a, b, c b ̧ d1 bз ·

Beyond the shadow of the ship

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes...

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware,