Five-line stanzas are formed in various ways, e. g., aaaba, aabba, aabab, abbba, ababa, ababb, etc., in lines of three, four, five, etc., stresses.
Six-Line Stanza
Six-line stanzas are formed by similar combinations; the most frequent is the quatrain + couplet, called, from Shakespeare's poem, the Venus and Adonis stanza, ababcc5 (compare the end of the English sonnet and the ottava rima).[55] Familiar examples are Wordsworth's To a Skylark and his fine Laodamia.
Since them art dead, lo! here I prophesy:
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:
It shall be waited on with jealousy,
Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end;
Ne'er settled equally, but high or low;
That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.
Venus and Adonis.
The same rimes with 4-stress verses are also common,[56] for example, Wordsworth's
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Another important 6-line stanza is the tail-rime or rime couée, a stanza much used in the Middle English romances and chosen by Chaucer for his parody, Sir Thopas. Harry Bailey, mine host of the Canterbury pilgrims, called it 'doggerel rime.' The simple and probably normal form is aa4b3cc4b3 or aa4b3aa4b3, which to save space in the manuscripts was written thus:
| Listeth, lordes, in good entent, | Of mirthe and of solas; |
| And I wol telle verrayment | |
| Al of a knyght was fair and gent | His name was sir Thopas. |
| In bataille and in tourneyment, |
Variations are extremely common: the aaa4b2ccc4b2 of Wordsworth's To the Daisy, aaaa4b2ccc4b3 of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, aa3b2ccc3b2 of S. F. Smith's America, aaa3b2ccc3b2 of Drayton's Agincourt, and the so-called Burns stanza, in which Burns wrote some fifty poems, aaa4b2a4b2, e. g., To a Mouse and Address to the Deil.