Other examples are: Threnos (in The Phœnix and the Turtle), Herbert's Trinity Sunday, Quarles' Shortness of Life, Browning's A Toccata of Galuppi's, Tennyson's The Two Voices, Swinburne's After a Reading, and Clear the Way; and (with a simple refrain) Cowper's To Mary:
The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast;
Ah, would that this might be the last!
My Mary!
Crashaw's Wishes to his Supposed Mistress rimes a2a3a4.
Tennyson's 'O Swallow, Swallow' in The Princess is in unrimed triplets.
On the terza rima see below, page 164.
Four-Line Stanza: Quatrain
The most important quatrains are the ballad stanza, riming a4b3c4b3 or a4b3a4b3 (the Common Measure of the hymnals), with the related Long Measure riming abab4 or abcb4; the In Memoriam stanza abba4; and the elegiac quatrain abab5. These are often combined into 8-and 12-line stanzas, as abab bcbc5 (called the Monk's Tale stanza), abab cdcd, etc., sometimes with alternating long and short lines. And these, as well as longer stanzas, are frequently varied by the use of repetitions and refrains.[52]
The ballad stanza, with its frequent variations of internal rime and additional verses is excellently illustrated by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. Similar is Tennyson's Sir Galahad, a 12-line stanza of three quatrains, a4b3a4b3cdc4d3efgf4. Another common variation is that of Hood's The Dream of Eugene Aram, Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, a4b3c4b3d4b3. The musical roughness of the old ballads should be contrasted with the regularized modern imitations, such as Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus. Better imitations are Rossetti's Stratton Water and The King's Tragedy, Robert Buchanan's Judas Iscariot, and W.B. Yeats's Father Gilligan. Sometimes a shorter quatrain is printed as a long couplet and combined into larger stanzas, as in Mr. Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman (which has an additional variation in the inserted fourth and fifth lines):
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.
The variations in Tennyson's The Revenge should be carefully studied.