Mercy, Madam, alas! I die, I die!
Other examples are found in M. Arnold’s poems Palladium (p. 251), Revolutions (p. 254), Self Deception (p. 225, with alternate masculine and feminine rhymes). This stanza is very popular throughout the Modern English period (cf. Metrik, ii, § 267).
Stanzas of this kind, however, consisting of trochaic verses, of six-foot (as in Tennyson’s Maud), seven- and eight-foot metres are not very frequently met with (cf. Metrik, ii, § 269)
§ 236. The four-lined, cross-rhyming stanza gives rise by doubling to the eight-lined (a b a b a b a b), which occurs very often in Middle English, as in Wright’s Spec. of Lyr. Poetry, p. 99, or in the Luve-Rone by Thomas de Hales, ed. Morris (Old Eng. Misc., p. 93), where both masculine and feminine rhymes are used:
A Mayde cristes me bit yorne,
þat ich hire wurche a luue ron:
For hwan heo myhle best ileorne
to taken on oþer soþ lefmon,
Þat treowest were of alle berne
and beste wyte cuþe a freo wymmon;