This stanza comes to a better conclusion when it winds up with a refrain, as in Percy’s Reliques, II. ii. 13. One very popular form of it consists of four-foot trochaic lines, e.g. in Burns, p. 197, M. Arnold, A Memory Picture, p. 23 (the two last lines of each stanza forming a refrain), or of four-foot iambic-anapaestic lines (Burns, My heart’s in the Highlands). Somewhat rarely it is made up of five-foot iambic or septenaric lines (cf. Metrik, ii, § 262).[188].
§ 233. We have next to consider the stanzas of four isometrical lines with intermittent rhyme (a b c b). As a rule they consist of three- or four-foot verses, which are really Alexandrines or acatalectic tetrameters rhyming in long couplets, and only in their written or printed arrangement broken up into short lines; as, e.g., in the following half-stanza from the older version of the Legend of St. Katherine, really written in eight-lined stanzas (ed. Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden, Neue Folge, Heilbronn, 1881, p. 242):
He that made heven and erthe
and sonne and mone for to schine,
Bring ous into his riche
and scheld ous fram helle pine!
Examples of such stanzas of four-foot trochaic and three-foot iambic verses that occur chiefly in Percy’s Reliques (cf. Metrik, ii, § 264), but also in M. Arnold, Calais Sands (p. 219), The Church of Brou, I., The Castle (p. 13, feminine and masculine verse-endings alternating), New Rome, p. 229, Parting, p. 191 (iambic-anapaestic three-beat and two-beat verses), Iseult of Ireland, p. 150 (iambic verses of five measures); cf. Metrik, ii, § 264
§ 234. Stanzas of eight lines result from this stanza by doubling, i. e. by adding a second couplet of the same structure and rhyme to the original long-line couplet. Such a form with the scheme a b c b d b e b meet in the complete stanza of the older Legend of St. Katherine just referred to:
He that made heven and erthe
and sonne and mone for to schine,