Quatrain

A quatrain is a stanza of four lines, the most common stanza in English verse, which may rhyme in patterns such as AABB, ABAB, ABBA or ABCB.

William Blake's "The Tyger" is built from quatrains. The first reads: "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Two rhymed couplets, AABB, with a drumbeat rhythm.

The common patterns

• AABB. Two couplets stacked. Brisk and easy to remember, as in Blake.
• ABAB. Alternating rhyme, each line answered two lines later. Shakespeare's sonnets use it in each quatrain.
• ABBA. An enclosed rhyme, in which the inner pair is wrapped in the outer pair. Tennyson used it in In Memoriam.
• ABCB. Only the second and fourth lines rhyme. This is the stanza of the ballad.

Why it lasts

A quatrain gives the poet room for a small movement: a setup, a development, a turn and a landing. Because the unit is short, a poem built of quatrains can change direction every four lines without losing the reader.

Why it matters to a writer or editor

Think of a quatrain as a stanza with a built-in beat of four. When editing a poem made of them, check that each does a job. A common weakness is a stanza that only restates the last one in different words. Another is the line added to fill the fourth slot. If the rhyme in the last line feels forced, the stanza probably wants a different rhyme scheme or one line fewer.

Read an example

Read an example: "Heroic Stanzas" by John Dryden (1658), a public domain poem on Bossfeed, which is built entirely from rhymed quatrains.

Frequently asked questions

What are the usual rhyme schemes of a quatrain?

AABB, ABAB, ABBA and ABCB are the common ones. A quatrain can also be unrhymed.

Why is the quatrain so common?

Four lines is long enough to set up a thought and finish it, and short enough to hold in the ear. Two couplets, or one question and answer, fit neatly into the shape.

Is a quatrain a whole poem?

It can be. Many epigrams and short poems are a single quatrain, but it also serves as the building block of longer poems.