Then to his poor trade he turned,
Whereby the daily meal was earned.
Similar stanzas in other metres occur in Longfellow, Tennyson, Thackeray, Rossetti, &c.; among them we find e.g. eight-foot trochaic and iambic-anapaestic verses (cf. Metrik, ii, § 3).
§ 231. More frequently we find four-line stanzas, consisting of couplets. In Middle English lyric poetry such stanzas of two short couplets are occasionally met with as early as in the Surtees Psalms, but they occur more frequently in Modern English, e.g. in M. Arnold, Urania (p. 217), and in Carew, e.g. The Inquiry (Poets, iii):
Amongst the myrtles as I walk’d,
Love and my sighs thus intertalk’d:
‘Tell me,’ said I, in deep distress,
‘Where I may find my shepherdess.’
Regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes is very rarely found in this simple stanza (or indeed in any Middle English stanzas); it is, properly speaking, only a series of rhyming couplets with a stop after every fourth line.
This stanza is very popular, as are also various analogous four-line stanzas in other metres. One of these is the quatrain of four-foot trochaic verses, as used by M. Arnold in The Last Word, and by Milton, e.g. in Psalm CXXXVI, where the two last lines form the refrain, so that the strophic arrangement is more distinctly marked. Stanzas of four-foot iambic-anapaestic lines we find e.g. in Moore, ’Tis the last Rose of Summer, and similar stanzas of five-foot iambic verses in Cowper, pp. 359, 410; M. Arnold, Self-Dependence (last stanza).