Glossary Term of the Day:

A quatrain is a stanza or poem consisting of four rhyming verses. There are a variety of rhyme schemes for the quatrain, the more prominent ones listed below:

• ABAC or ABCB -- known as unbounded or ballad quatrain -- as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
  
  The Following Text Is Quoted:

  It is an ancient Mariner,
  And he stoppeth one of three.
  'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
  Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
  
  The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
  And I am next of kin;
  The guests are met, the feast is set:
  May'st hear the merry din.'
• AABB -- a double couplet -- as in A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”:
  
  The Following Text Is Quoted:

  The time you won your town the race
  We chaired you through the market-place;
  Man and boy stood cheering by,
  And home we brought you shoulder-high.
• ABAB -- known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic -- as in “Sadie and Maud” by Gwendolyn Brooks:
  
  The Following Text Is Quoted:

  She didn’t leave a tangle in.
  Her comb found every strand.
  Sadie was one of the livingest chits
  In all the land.
• ABBA -- known as envelope or enclosed -- as in John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage”:
  
  The Following Text Is Quoted:

  Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
  and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
  Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
  A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.
• AABA, the stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
  
  The Following Text Is Quoted:

  Whose woods these are I think I know.
  His house is in the village though;
  He will not see me stopping here
  To watch his woods fill up with snow.
  
  My little horse must think it queer
  To stop without a farmhouse near
  Between the woods and frozen lake
  The darkest evening of the year.