1. Old English, feower; Latin, quattuor; Greek, tettares. The four cardinal points of the compass, the four sides of a square. This number expresses and stands for evenness and completeness in several ways.
In most preliterate cultures, the world was organized into fours. Almost all Native American peoples, for example, not using anything like a Linnaean system to classify phenomena, put things in four categories based on the points of the compass. Plants, animals, clans, numbers, genders, weathers, colors were associated with the four directions.
THE FOUR-LINE STANZA IN METRICAL POETRY
2. There is no four-line form in English, but the four-line stanza, the quatrain, is basic to most English lyric forms, one of the earliest of which was the ballad stanza, which consists of four lines, a tetrameter line followed by a trimeter followed by a tetrameter followed by a trimeter, with an abab or an abcb rhyme scheme. This form was adapted to the hymn and has been called the common measure or the hymn stanza. As soon as Middle English verse found its way to accentual syllabic meters, the lyric is given shape by the four-line stanza, as in this one (author unknown):
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu;
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And spingeth the wode nu—
To which it added a playful refrain:
Sing cuccu!
The abcb stanza was particularly attractive because it used rhyme to secure a conclusion and gave some freedom to the other two lines. Not surprising that the best-known four-line poem in the language is in that form (author also unknown):
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ! that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
And one of the best-known eight-line poems:
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
3. Again the number of possible structures increases: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, 2 + 2, 3 + 1, 1 + 3, 1 + 2 + 1, 1 + 1 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, so that great variety is possible in a longer form. “Western Wind” is 2 + 2.
Blake’s “The Sick Rose” consists of two sentences, one of them compound. So it is at the first level 1 + 7. Taking the compound into consideration, the rhythmic pattern is 1 + 5 + 2, enjambed across the stanza break (to suggest the worm’s terrifying ability to penetrate), and the poem also lays down one perception per line, 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 in a fatal cadence. Unless you think of that “bed of crimson joy” as a single image, in which case, the movement lingers a little there, 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1. Enjambment, of course, multiplies and complicates all these possibilities. It can also be doled out this way, 1 +3 + 2 + 2:
One image, one line:
O Rose, thou art sick.
One image, three lines:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
One image, two lines:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
One image, two lines:
And his dark, secret love
Does thy life destroy.
4. In the late teens of the new century, when Pound and Eliot, talking, decided that the vers libre movement in America was descending into sloppiness, and they decided to put some starch back into modernism, to go back, as Pound said, to “the Bay State Hymnal,” it was the quatrain they turned to. Pound in the pyrotechnic bravura of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”:
For three years, out of touch with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάν πάνθ’, όσ’ ένι Τροίη
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
And Eliot in various poems, including this one in which he elects to have an Irishman stand for gross sensuality:
Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above,
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
It was the first neoformalist retrenching.
5. The best way to get a sense of the four-line stanza in English is to pick up an anthology and read through it. Probably, for this form, metrical pattern is just as important as stanza patterning. Five basic meters, rhyme scheme aside, have been used regularly with the four-line stanza: the pentameter quatrain, the tetrameter quatrain, the headless tetrameter quatrain, the ballad stanza, and the trimeter quatrain. Here’s an example of each:
William Butler Yeats, pentameter quatrain:
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
Robert Frost, tetrameter quatrain:
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.
John Donne, headless tetrameter quatrain:
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot,
William Wordsworth, the ballad stanza:
A slumber did my spirit seal.
I had no human fears.
She seemed a thing who could feel
The touch of earthly years.
Theodore Roethke, trimeter quatrain:
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
And there are, of course, endless variations, like the stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo,” a trimeter quatrain with a pentameter third line:
This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,
Or Hardy’s trimeter with a tetrameter third line:
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
And here is Emily Dickinson’s dimeter quatrain:
Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
6. The form got used for different purposes in different periods. In the Renaissance, for example, it is a song form:
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
(William Shakespeare)
But the tetrameter quatrain also was associated with old-fashioned, non-Italian common sense, with English plainness:
My friends, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;
(Walter Raleigh)
And the more ambitious work was carried on in Italian and classical forms, pastorals, elegies, and sonnets.
In the seventeenth century, among the Royalist poets, it was almost always associated with song:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
(Robert Herrick)
When the devotional poets, and later the Puritan poets used it, they tended to complicate it. George Herbert, for example, gives the tetrameter a dying fall in “Virtue”:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky:
The dews shall weep thy fall tonight;
For thou must die.
And in his “Horation Ode,” Andrew Marvell invents a curious-sounding quatrain of two tetrameter lines followed by two trimeters:
’Tis time to leave the books in dust,
And oil the unused armor’s rust,
Removing from the wall
The corslet in the hall.
The crucial development in the eighteenth century was the Protestant hymn. It begins with Isaac Watts:
Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
It kept the English plainness, and the form’s roots in song, and gave it Protestant inwardness. And it was this form that migrated to Protestant America in “Rock of Ages” and “Amazing Grace” (written by John Newton, the reformed captain of a slaving ship) and in carols like “It came upon a midnight clear.” In the nineteenth century in America a New York minister named Robert Lowry wrote “Shall We Gather at the River” to commemorate parishioners killed in a virulent epidemic of influenza. Philadelphia minister Phillips Brooks wrote a Christmas carol two years after the Civil War that was also a prayer for peace:
O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie!
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are gathered here tonight.
In the literary tradition, the Protestant hymn gave a form to the only two poets in the language for whom the quatrain was central, Blake for the Songs of Innocence and Experience and Dickinson for the infinite variations she wrung on the common measure in a thousand poems. The other major poet for whom it was important was Thomas Hardy. For him it was a ballad form, a late flowering of the ballad revival that was the other important development in the eighteenth century. Thomas Percy’s Reliques, a late-eighteenth-century collection of old ballads, seemed like fresh air to the young romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge after a century of the heroic couplet, and the desire to return to roots in song, narrative, and plain English diction gave a title to their collaborative collection, Lyrical Ballads. And a form to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.
The other eighteenth-century development had to do with the pentameter quatrain. In “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray used it to write a lulling descriptive line that got imitated all through the next century:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Victorians used all these forms—the descriptive-philosophical pentameter (it’s the one Yeats used in 1893 for “When You Are Old and Grey”), the narrative quatrain, the song, the prayer or ballad. The two notable developments in the later nineteenth century are Alfred Lord Tennyson’s quatrain for “In Memoriam,” the only well-known long poem in English to use such a simple form. It’s written as a series of short lyrics, four quatrains long (the form, minus meter and rhyme, John Ashbery used in Shadow Train).
Here’s Tennyson:
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
The other Victorian excitement was Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat quatrain, which we’ll look at below. The century ends with Hardy’s grim, exacting uses of the ballad:
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgement Day
And sat upright—
As we have seen, in another few years, Eliot and Pound would be reviving, with peculiar modernist twists, the plain-spoken tetrameter quatrain to beat it over the heads of Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg and what they regarded as the slovenliness of the new American free verse movement.
7. Russian acmeist verse: Acmeism was the Russian equivalent of imagism in the early twentieth century. It wasn’t a free verse movement, but a movement against symbolist obscurity and toward classical hardness. Its preferred mode was the Russian tetrameter couplet, which mixed monosyllabic and polysyllabic rhyme. Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak—not a member of the group—all did brilliant work in the short tetrameter form, and Mandelstam’s Stone (1913) begins with a couple of four-line poems in the stanza. Here are some translations of each. Maybe some of you know Russian and can do better:
An apple drops to the ground,
toneless, precise
—and all around
the song of the trees, the forest silence . . .
(Tr. Burton Raffael)
The shy speechless sound
of a fruit falling from its tree,
and around it the silent music
of the forest, unbroken . . .
(Tr. W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown)
The careful and hollow thud
of a fruit snapped from a tree
amidst the neverending song
of the deep forest silence . . .
(Tr. David McDuff)
A tentative hollow note
As a pod falls from a tree
In the constant melody
Of the wood’s deep quiet . . .
(Tr. Robert Tracy)
Here is another one:
You appeared out of the half-
dark hall, suddenly, wearing a shawl—
we disturbed no one,
we woke no servants . . .
(Tr. Burton Raffael)
All the lamps were turned low.
You slipped out quickly in a thin shawl.
We disturbed no one.
The servants went on sleeping.
(Tr. W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown)
Suddenly in a light shawl
you slipped out of the half-darkened hall—
we disturbed no one,
we did not wake the sleeping servants . . .
(Tr. David McDuff)
In a light shawl, you suddenly slipped
Out of the shadowed hall—
We disturbed no one at all
Nor woke the servants up . . .
(Tr. Robert Tracy)
THE FOUR-LINE STANZA IN FREE VERSE
8. So we’ve seen the expressive associations of the quatrain inherited by the poets who made a break from metrical poetry.
It’s interesting, in this way, to see how Whitman uses it in “Song of Myself.” Mostly, he avoids it—it’s too balanced. But he seems to use it sometimes when he wants to say an important thing plainly and forcibly:
Creeds and school in abeyance,
Retiring back awhile sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
_
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
And occasionally for descriptive purposes as in the pentameter quatrain of Thomas Gray:
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
_
. . . The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow.
And, in a memorable riff in “The Sleepers,” Whitman makes a kind of lullaby of its sense of completion:
The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm on the hip of his wife, and she with her palm on the hip of her husband,
The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed,
The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs,
And the mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt.
The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps,
The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep?
And the murder’d person, how does he sleep?
The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.
9. Probably the most famous quatrain in modernist verse is Pound’s translation of Li Bai in Cathay (1915), “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance”:
The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
This accomplishes several things. It contains the imagist ideal of clear presentation. It shows a way to write a four-line poem that’s not an epigram. It shows a way, by following the presentation of the Chinese characters, to write free verse based on limpid English sentence rhythms. And it shows a way to use the effects of both Gray’s pentameter quatrain and the full tetrameter quatrain without evoking the effects of meter.
The last two lines could in fact be scanned as tetrameter:
An̆d Í/ lét dówn/ th̆e cŕys/ tăl cúr/ tain
An̆d wátch/ th̆e móon/ throŭgh th̆e cleár aút/umn
but the first two lines don’t scan so easily:
The jew/ elled steps/ are al/ ready /quite white/ with dew
It is/ so late/ that the dew/ soaks my/ gauze stock/ ings
Easier to scan it accentually, six beats and six beats, then four and four tending to five:
The jewélled stéps alreády qúite whíte with déw
It is só láte that the déw sóaks my gaúze stóckings
And I lét doẃn the cŕystal cúrtain
And wátch the móon thróugh the cléar autúmn
The first line is six stresses parceled out between slight pauses like this: 2/3/1. The second line is also six stresses with a slightly different rhythmic character: 2/1/3. The third line is four stresses: 2/2, a contraction, and the fourth line is an expansion, but to five stresses not six. It relaxes the pattern. 2/1/2, as if it were the balance the first two lines were trying to find. (This depends, I know, on hearing “through” as a stressed syllable. Monosyllabic prepositions in ordinary speech don’t receive stress, but the slight pause after “And watch the moon” and the article before “clear” does, to my ear, throw weight onto “through.” If the line read “And watched the moon through clear autumn air,” one wouldn’t hear a stress on “through.”) The effect Pound achieves seems from this distance wonderfully calculated, but, of course, he was feeling his way. And the combination of the apparent simplicity of Chinese sentence construction and the clear-mindedness of the Taoist sensibility had allowed something new to happen to the sound of English verse—but the effect is too quiescent to have interested Pound for long. In fact, he avoided the four-line stanza in general. I can only think of one in all of the Cantos:
Nor can he who has passed a month in the death cells
believe in capital punishment
No man who has passed a month in the death cells
believes in cages for beasts.
There are none to speak of in Eliot, and very few in Stevens, who much preferred twos and threes.
10. H.D., trying to work out a free verse song form, uses the stanza but almost always in poems that mix stanza lengths. Here is the first poem from her first book, Sea Garden (1916):
Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,
more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
you are caught in the drift.
Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives the wind.
Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?
So it was Williams who experimented with it most, hardly at all at first, and then in the ’30s and ’40s more and more. He seemed to like it, especially the rough four-beat line that approached the tetrameter, for its definiteness:
Sometimes I envy others, fear them
a little too, if they write well.
For when I cannot write I’m a sick man
and want to die. The cause is plain.
But they have no access to my sources.
Let them write then as they can and
perfect it as they can they will never
come to the secret of that form
interknit with the unfathomable ground
where we walk daily and from which
among the rest you have sprung
and opened flower-like to my hand.
For more recent instances, Ashbery’s Shadow Train is particularly interesting to look at. And there is Frank O’Hara’s “Poem” of 1952, which has an extremely complicated attitude toward the notion of order a stanza proposes.
The eager note on my door said, “Call me,
call when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!
Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
For shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was
there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.
THE FOUR-LINE POEM: CHUEH-CHU AND RUBA’I
11. The Chinese quatrain was one of the great literary forms of the Tang dynasty. It was called chueh-chu, or “curtailed verse.” It was a form of “regulated verse,” or chin-t’i-shih, in which the pattern of tones followed certain rules. The poem of Li Bai that Pound translated was a chueh-chu. But there were also four-line poems in the “old” or unpatterned style—nearer to the rhythm of folk songs—and Li Bai particularly favored that form. Arthur Cooper: “. . . the fourfold structure has something at once like a little sonata-form and like the composition of a painting. The sonata form of these poems is reflected in the Chinese names of each of the lines: the first is called ‘Raising,’ that is, introduction of the theme; the second is called ‘Forwarding,’ that is, development; the third, ‘Twisting,’ or introduction of a new theme,; and the fourth ‘Concluding.’”
All of the great Tang masters, Du Fu, Li Bai, Bai Juyi, Wang Wei, and the eccentric Han Shan, worked in the form. There is even a long poem by Li He, often called the Chinese Rimbaud, which is about all the ways the bureaucratic system and its examinations did in poets. It consists of twenty-six quatrains and it’s called “Twenty-six Ways of Breaking Wild Horses.” Impossible to represent these poets, whom some think the greatest constellation of lyric poetry in any language ever, in a few lines.
Here’s one poem by Du Fu:
My rain-soaked herbs: some still sparse, some lush.
They freshen the porch and pavilion with their color.
These waste mountains are full of them. But what’s what?
I don’t know the names and the root shapes are terrifying.
That’s the seven-syllable form. Here’s a five:
Through Censor Ts’ui I Send a Quatrain to Kao Shih
Half my hundred-year life gone—
Another autumn, hunger and cold return.
Ask the Prefect of P’eng-chou how long,
In such distress, one must await rescue.
12. The ruba’i: The term means “foursome.” This Persian couplet, divided into rhyming half lines, emerged sometime around 900, and became the traditional short form in the Islamic world. It got introduced into English, of course, by Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the ruba’i of the Persian mathematician and philosopher, Omar Khayyam. Their hedonism and skepticism went off like a bomb in late Victorian England. Our age has been more interested in Sufi mystical traditions, and, probably, Coleman Bark’s translations of Rumi are now the best-known rendering of Middle Eastern verse. Fitzgerald holds up remarkably well. If you’ve never read him, or not read him lately, it is worth taking a look. In the 1960s Robert Graves retranslated the poems, arguing that Fitzgerald had misrepresented Omar. And there was another version in the 1970s by the scholar Peter Avery and the poet John Heath-Stubbs, which tried, they said, to convey the “hard directness of the Persian.”
A recent scholarly translation by L. P. Elwell-Sutton may get nearer to the bone.
Omar Khayyam was a mathematician and astronomer. He wrote a treatise on algebra, helped devise the Islamic calendar, and made important contributions to astronomy. The poems were the by-blows, musings, of a very sophisticated intelligence living in a very rich civilization at a time when Europe was mostly a bunch of thuggish robber barons hacking out their territories. Here are some of the Elwell-Sutton versions:
This circle in which we come and go
Has neither origin nor final end.
Will no one ever tell us truthfully
Whence we have come and whither do we go?
*
Even a drunk would never propose
To smash to bits his neatly-fashioned cup.
By whom then were so many comely bodies,
fashioned in love, yet smashed in angry hate?
*
Every particle of dust upon this earth
Was once a moon-like face, a Venus brow.
Wipe the dust gently from your lover’s cheek.
For that dust too was once a lover’s cheek.
*
The boundless universe was born of night.
No man has ever pierced its secrets.
They all have much to say for their own good,
But they can’t tell you who they are, or why.
*
The dawn is here; wake up, lovely.
Pour wine slowly, slowly; pluck the lute.
For those who are here aren’t staying long,
And those who’ve gone aren’t ever coming back.
What moved Fitzgerald about Omar, whose poems he was piecing out of very old and hard-to-read Persian manuscripts with the one available English-Persian dictionary, was what he called the “Epicurean pathos.” And it was this flavor that so took Algernon Charles Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, and the other rebellious Victorians when they came across the poem—the entire edition had been remaindered; they bought their copies for a penny apiece at a Thames-side used book stall—ten years after its publication:
There was a door to which I found no key;
There was a veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There was—and then no more of THEE and ME.
*
And lately, by the tavern door agape,
Came shining through the dusk an Angel Shape
Bearing a vessel on his shoulder; and
He bid me taste of it; and ’twas—the Grape!
The late-nineteenth-century poets sort of combined Keats and Fitzgerald to produce their poems of rebellion and sensuality. Here is Swinburne in “Laus Veneris,” using the Omar stanza. As far as I know, it’s the only Victorian poem about a hickey:
Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out,
Soft, and stung softly—fairer for a fleck.
13. Here are a couple quatrains by Yeats:
Spilt Milk
We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone.
The Spur
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song.
14. Jump ahead. Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge in 1995, a long poem made out of more than three hundred four-line stanzas in a punning bluesy diction. The first one begins with a nod to Sappho’s quatrain:
Sapphire’s lyre styles
plucked eyebrows
bow legs and hips
whose lives are lonely too
my last nerve’s lucid music
sure chewed up the juicy fruit
you must don’t like my peaches
there’s some left on the tree.