Here the frons is connected with the cauda, which recurs in each stanza as a kind of refrain, by means of concatenatio. Two other poems of Minot’s (v, ix) are written in similar stanzas of six and eight lines. In the ten-lined stanza of the poem in Wright’s Spec. of Lyr. Poetry, p. 25, which is of similar structure, we find the doubling of the frons.
A six-lined stanza of this kind, which has the formula a a a b B B (B B being refrain-verses), is used by Dunbar in his Gray-Horse poem and in Luve Erdly and Divine. The latter begins:
Now culit is Dame Venus brand;
Trew Luvis fyre is ay kindilland,
And I begyn to undirstand,
In feynit luve quhat foly bene;
Now cumis Aige quhair Yowth hes bene,
And true Luve rysis fro the splene.
The same kind of stanza occurs in Wyatt, p. 137. Other forms are: a a b a b b5, in Wyatt, p. 71; a b c c b a4 in John Scott, Conclusion (Poets, ix. 773); a b c b c a4 in Tennyson, A Character (p. 12):
With a half-glance upon the sky