It is only rarely that we find stanzas formed on the scheme a a a a b b (e.g. in the Surtees Psalter, xlix. 21; in Ben Jonson, Poets, iv. 574); or on the formula a a b b a b4, as in Swinburne, Poems, i. 248.
One form, analogous to the stanza first mentioned in this section and used pretty often in Modern English, has crossed rhymes a b a b a b. It occurs with four-foot verses in Byron, She walks in Beauty:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies:
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
The same stanza of trochaic or iambic-anapaestic metres of three or five measures is also frequently met with (cf. Metrik, ii, § 358).