In the seventeenth century the quatrain was a favorite tool of the old English writers who wished to embody a stinging epigram or epitaph in verse. The works of Robert Herrick contain several, most of them, unfortunately, not fit for print. Nor was he the only unblushing exponent of the questionable quatrain.
But times have changed and like everything else the quatrain has grown respectable. From the disuse and misuse into which it had fallen the modern magazine editor rescued it and by creating a market revived the art of quatrain making. To-day sometimes the four lines are descriptive; again they contain a kindly or clever epigram, or perhaps an unexpected twist at the end that makes for a joke.
The average quatrain is in iambic pentameter with alternate lines rhyming. Sometimes the first and fourth lines rhyme and the second and third, and occasionally one sees a detached Omaric stanza. It all depends upon the thought and the way it is to be expressed. One thing is certain, that the quatrain because of its very brevity demands more care and polishing than a longer piece of verse. The thought must not only be concise and clearly expressed but the four lines must contain nothing else.
The following example by Frank Dempster Sherman not only describes this form of verse but is an excellent quatrain in itself:
“Hark at the lips of this pink whorl of shell
And you shall hear the ocean’s surge and roar:
So in the quatrain’s measure, written well
A thousand lines shall all be sung in four.”
The Sonnet
It is the ambition of many a versifier to be known as a maker of sonnets. Doubtless this love for the form is prompted not only by its possibilities but even more by its traditions. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Rossetti, to mention only a few of the celebrated names, were masters of the sonnet, though it must be said that the version used by the earlier English writers was not the one we know to-day. Shakespeare’s seventy-third sonnet may serve as a fair example of the arrangement of the lines in the early Elizabethan period, though even in his day the present rhyming order was passing gradually into use.
“That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves or few or none do hang
Upon the boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceivest which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
This fourteen lines, as an examination will discover, might be written in three four-line stanzas with an additional two lines as an epigrammatic envoy. In fact it can scarcely be called a sonnet at all, and the last two lines come out with such force as to offend the ear accustomed to the more modern form.