3. The Rhymed Couplet (vierhebige Reimpaare) was introduced from the Volkslied. The verse ending is always masculine. Best adapted to a rapidly progressing action, every stanza marks a forward step, portrays a new scene (28, 29, 74).
4. The Sonnet, an Italian verse form, is composed of fourteen iambic lines of five feet each. The rhyme for the first eight lines, called the octave, is always abbaabba; for the last six, called the sestette, the rhyme may be cdcdcd, ccdccd, or cdecde (69 and 77).
5. The Siziliane, likewise Italian, consists of eight iambic lines of five feet each, the rhyme being abababab (135 and 136).
6. The Modified Nibelungen Stanza, an adaptation of the stanza of the Nibelungenlied introduced by Uhland, is a stanza of four verses rhyming in couplets; each verse has six accented syllables with a fixed pause as indicated below in the scansion of the first two lines of 32:
X — X — X — X || X — X — X— X — X — XX — X || X — X — X —
Each line is in reality composed of two verses and thus we have here the form so commonly used by Heine (48, 49, 50, 51, 52 and others). Each verse has in reality four measures, the last measure being taken up by a pause:
Es stand in al ten Zei ten | | ein Schloss so hoch und hehr.
X — X — X — X * X — X — X — **
In music these pauses may be taken up in whole or in part by lengthening the preceding notes (to some extent this holds true in reading, adding to the effect of the enjambement). Die Lorelei offers a good example:
[Musical notation in original for following lyric. Transcriber.]
Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, daß
ich so traurig bin; ein Märchen aus alten
Zeiten, das kommt mir nicht aus bem Sinn. Die
Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt, und ruhig fließt der Rhein; der
Gipfel des Berges funkelt im Abendsonnenschein.