Stanzas with the scheme a b b a also belong to this group, the two halves not being exactly equal, but only similar to each other on account of the unequal arrangement of rhymes.
Such a stanza of four-foot iambic verses occurs in an elegy of Ben Jonson’s (Poets, iv. 571):
Though beauty be the mark of praise,
And yours of whom I sing be such,
As not the world can praise too much,
Yet is’t your virtue now I raise.
and notably in Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Both this stanza and the similar stanza of trochaic verses are found pretty often (cf. Metrik, ii, § 311)
§ 255. More frequently five-lined stanzas occur. One on the scheme a b b a a4, similar to that just mentioned, is used in Sidney, Psalm XXVIII; others, composed in various metres, have a one-rhymed frons or cauda, e.g. a a a b b3 in Wyatt, p. 128, a a b b b4 in Moore (Still when Daylight) and other poets. Of greater importance are some stanzas on the formula a a b a b; they may be looked upon as isometrical tail-rhyme-stanzas, shortened by one chief verse; as a a b a B4, often occurring in Dunbar, e.g. in The Devil’s Inquest, and in Wyatt, p. 29:
My lute awake, perform the last
Labour, that thou and I shall waste,