I. One-rhymed and indivisible stanzas.
The one-rhymed stanzas, taken as a whole, cannot without qualification be ranged under any of the other kinds of stanza. The four-lined and eight-lined stanzas of this form, it is true, do for the most part seem to belong so far as their syntactical structure is concerned to the bipartite, equal-membered class (a a, a a; a a a a, a a a a). But those of six lines may belong either to the bipartite (a a a, a a a) or to the tripartite class (a a, a a, a a). It is even more difficult to draw a sharp line of distinction when the strophes have an odd number of lines.
In no case is there such a definite demarcation between the chief parts in these one-rhymed stanzas as exists in stanzas with varied rhymes, whether based upon crossed rhymes or on rhyming couplets. Three-lined stanzas of the same structure as the four-lined stanzas to be described in the next section were not used before the Modern period. They occur pretty often, and are constructed of widely different kinds of verse; in Drayton’s The Heart (Poets, iii. 580) three-foot lines are used:
If thus we needs must go,
What shall our one heart do,
This one made of our two?
Stanzas of this kind, consisting of three-foot trochaic and dactylic verses, as well as stanzas of four-foot iambic, iambic-anapaestic, trochaic, and dactylic verses, are also met with in the Modern period. Even more popular, however, are those of five-foot iambic verses, as e. g. in Dryden, pp. 393, 400, &c. Stanzas of longer verses, on the other hand, e.g. six-foot dactylic, seven-foot trochaic, iambic, or iambic-anapaestic and eight-foot trochaic verses, occur only occasionally in the more recent poets, e.g. Tennyson, Swinburne, R. Browning, D.G. Rossetti, &c. (cf. Metrik, ii, §§ 303–4).
Some other Modern English anisometrical stanzas may also be mentioned, as one in Cowley with the formula a5 a4 a5 in Love’s Visibility (Poets, v. 273):
With much of pain, and all the art I knew
Have I endeavour’d hitherto