--

1. _Gay's stanza._--Lines of three measures, x a, with alternate rhymes.
The odd (i.e. the 1st and 3rd) rhymes double.

'Twas when the seas were roaring
With hollow blasts of wind,
A damsel lay deploring,
All on a rock reclined.

2. _Common octosyllabics._--Four measures, x a, with rhyme, and (unless the
rhymes be double) eight syllables (_octo syllabae_).--Butler's Hudibras,
Scott's poems, The Giaour, and other poems of Lord Byron.

3. _Elegiac octosyllabics_.--Same as the last, except that the rhymes are
regularly alternate, and the verses arranged in stanzas.

And on her lover's arm she leant,
And round her waist she felt it fold,
And far across the hills they went,
In that new world which now is old:
Across the hills and far away,
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day
The happy princess follow'd him.--TENNYSON.

4. _Octosyllabic triplets._--Three rhymes in succession. Generally arranged
as stanzas.

I blest them, and they wander'd on;
I spoke, but answer came there none;
The dull and bitter voice was gone.--TENNYSON.

5. _Blank verse._--Five measures, x a, without rhyme, Paradise Lost,
Young's Night Thoughts, Cowper's Task.

6. _Heroic couplets._--Five measures, x a, with pairs of rhymes. Chaucer,
Denham, Dryden, Waller, Pope, Goldsmith, Cowper, Byron, Moore, Shelley, &c.
This is the common metre for narrative, didactic, and descriptive poetry.

7. _Heroic triplets._--Five measures, x a. Three rhymes in succession.
Arranged in stanzas. This metre is sometimes interposed among heroic
couplets.

8. _Elegiacs._--Five measures, x a; with regularly alternate rhymes, and
arranged in stanzas.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herds wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homewards plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.--GRAY.

9. _Rhymes royal._--Seven lines of heroics, with the last two rhymes in
succession, and the first five recurring at intervals.

This Troilus, in gift of curtesie,
With hauk on hond, and with a huge rout
Of knightes, rode, and did her company,
Passing all through the valley far about;
And further would have ridden out of doubt.
Full faine and woe was him to gone so sone;
But turn he must, and it was eke to doen.--CHAUCER.

This metre was common with the writers of the earlier part of Queen
Elizabeth's reign. It admits of varieties