There are besides in Sidney’s Arcadia, pp. 227 (232, xxxv) and 533, Anacreontic stanzas of varying length, consisting of 3–11 verses and constructed in this way:
My Múse, what áiles this árdour?
To bláse my ónely sécrets?
Alás, it ís no glóry
To síng mine ówne decáid state.
§ 213. In connexion with these imitations of classical verses and stanzas without rhyme some other forms should be mentioned which took their rise from an attempt to get rid of end-rhyme. Orm was the first to make the experiment in his rhymeless Septenary, but he found no followers in the Middle English period; Surrey, several centuries later, on the other hand, did achieve success with his blank verse. In the beginning of the seventeenth century Thomas Campion, in his Observations on the Arte of English Poesy (London, 1602), tried to introduce certain kinds of rhymeless verses and stanzas, mostly trochaic; e.g. trochaic verses of three measures (with masculine endings) and of five measures (with feminine endings); distichs consisting of one five-foot iambic and one six-foot trochaic verse (both masculine); then a free imitation of the Sapphic metre and other kinds of rhymeless stanzas, quoted and discussed in Metrik, ii, § 254. But these early and isolated attempts need not engage our attention in this place, as they had probably no influence on similar experiments of later poets.
In Milton, e.g., we find a stanza corresponding to the formula a b5 c d3, in his imitation of the fifth Ode of Horace, Book I, used also by Collins, Ode to Evening (Poets, ix. 526):
If áught of oáten stóp or pástoral sóng
May hópe, chast Éve, to soóthe thy módest éar
Like thý own sólemn spríngs