His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
This euphonious stanza became very popular and has been used by many of the chief Modern English poets, as e.g. by Thomson, The Castle of Indolence; Shenstone, The School-Mistress; Burns, The Cotter’s Saturday Night; Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; Shelley, The Revolt of Islam.
The great influence it had on the development of the different forms of stanza, especially in the earlier Modern English period, is proved by the numerous imitations and analogous formations which arose from it.
§ 298. All the imitations have this in common that they consist of a series of two to ten five-foot lines followed by a concluding line of six (or rarely seven) feet.
John Donne, Phineas Fletcher, and Giles Fletcher were, it seems, the inventors of those varieties of stanza, the shortest of which consist of three or four lines on the schemes a a5 a6, a b a5 b6, and were used by Rochester, Upon Nothing (Poets, iv. 413), and Cowper (p. 406). A stanza of five lines, however, on the model a b a b5 b6 occurs in Phineas Fletcher’s Eclogue II.
The favourite six-lined stanza with the formula a b a b c c5 (cf. § [267, p. 327]) was often transformed into a quasi-Spenserian stanza a b a b c5 c6 by adding one foot to the last line, as e.g. by Dodsley in On the Death of Mr. Pope (Poets, xi. 103), Southey, The Chapel Bell (ii. 143), and others; cf. Metrik, ii, § 493.