Hou holy wryt spekeþ of mon;
Herkneþ nou to me.
The last line of each half-stanza, the tail-verse proper, was originally simply a refrain. The tripartite character of the half-stanza and the popular origin of the stanza was shown long ago by Wolf, Über die Lais, Sequenzen und Leiche, p. 27 (cf. Engl. Metrik, i, pp. 353–7). According to him this stanza was developed first of all from choruses sung in turn by the people and from the ecclesiastical responses which also had a popular origin, and lastly from the sequences and ‘proses’ of the middle ages.
A sequence-verse such as:
Egidio psallat coetus | iste laetus | Alleluia,
in its tripartition corresponds to the first half of the above-quoted Middle English tail-rhyme stanza:
Lustneþ alle a lutel þrowe | ȝe þat wolleþ ou selue yknowe | Unwys þah y be.
When two long lines like this, connected with each other by the rhyme of the last section, the two first sections of each line being also combined by leonine rhyme, are broken up into six short verses, we have the tail-rhyme stanza in the form above described. This form was frequently used in Low Latin poetry, and thence passed into Romanic and Teutonic literature.
A form even more extensively used in Middle and Modern English poetry is that in which the tail-verse has feminine instead of masculine endings. A Modern English specimen from Drayton’s poem To Sir Henry Goodere (Poets, iii. 576) may be quoted; it begins: