Methinks all things that lovely be
Are present, and my soul delighted:
For beauties that from worth arise,
Are like the grace of deities,
Still present with us though unsighted.
In this poem all the tail-verses are feminine throughout; in other cases there are masculine and feminine verses, more often we find masculine or feminine exclusively; but usually they interchange without any rule. Examples of these varieties, and also of similar stanzas consisting of three-foot trochaic verses, of two- and three-foot iambic-anapaestic, and of five-foot iambic lines are given in Metrik, ii, § 273.
Stanzas of this form consisting of two-stressed verses occurring in Middle English poems have been quoted in § 65
§ 239. A variety that belongs to Modern English only is that in which the tail-verses are placed at the head of the half-stanzas, according to the formula a b b a c c. It occurs in Ben Jonson’s Hymn to God (Poets, iv. 561), consisting of two-foot iambic verses; another example, with four-foot trochaic verses, occurs in Mrs. Browning, A Portrait (iii. 57); cf. Metrik, ii, § 274.
A twelve-lined stanza, resulting from the doubling of the six-line stanza, is found only in Middle English poetry, its arrangement of rhymes being a a b c c b d d b e e b; or with a more elaborate rhyme-order, a a b a a b c c b c c b, as in Wright’s Spec. of Lyr. Poetry, p. 41.