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Updated: June 28, 2025
There is a main pause in passing from the octave to the sestet, and frequently there are minor pauses in passing from the first quatrain to the second, and from the first tercet to the last. Almost all of Petrarch's sonnets follow this rhyme-scheme: for the octave, a b b a a b b a; for the sestet, either c d e c d e or c d c d c d. This strict "Petrarchan" form has endured for six centuries.
Capricorn had a very fine sense of bad taste in verse, and the authorities could have chosen no one better suited for the duty of editing such a volume. I must not give the reader too much of these lines, but the following quatrain deserves recognition and a permanent memory: Napoleon hoped that all the world would fall beneath his sway. He failed in this ambition; and where is he to-day?
With his hands in the pockets of his flannel sack he paced through the room. Maryan had translated that quatrain quite beautifully. Without interrupting his pacing he repeated the translation. The bell rang in the antechamber; Maryan entered the drawing-room. He was paler than usual and had dark lines under his eyes, which were very bright.
Find the classicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in that quatrain! Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Massachusetts, and read this amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New England recluse, Emily Dickinson: "This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, And Lads and Girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls.
He reeled slowly through the crowd, crooning a quatrain, in a low, monotonous voice, his eyelids drooping and his head forward on his breast: If the Red Slayer think he slays, Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep and pass and turn again! Entranced the whirling crowd paused and watched. One of their number had received the "power."
The melancholy richness of the rolling quatrain with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of farce and solemnity, passion and playfulness, the abundance of the imagery, the power of the thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, make the poem actually, though not original or English, one of the greatest of English poems.
If Frank was kept away from any poetry he could not altogether understand, he would soon be grown-up, so that he would not be tempted by any kind of poetry any more than his father was. I am sure Frank's father would have disapproved of the way my Philosopher takes his poetry. His favorite poem is "A frog he would a-wooing go," especially the first quatrain.
Poetry in this way sometimes endures the most alarming oscillations without being in any way damaged, but, on the contrary, sometimes rather improved. I might refer to a signal instance of this, where, by some mysterious accident at press, the lines of a poem written in quatrains got their order inverted, so that the second and fourth of each quatrain changed places.
He greeted me in a friendly manner and begged me to tell him the story of the girl I had gone to see, on the promise of the Latin quatrain referring to her accommodating disposition. I gave him the address and copied out the verses, and he said that was enough to convince an enlightened judge that I had been slandered; but he, nevertheless, was very doubtful whether justice would be done me.
There is not a single passage in Titus Andronicus more Shakespearean than the magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the little birds; but the rest of the scene in which we come upon it, and the whole scene preceding, are in blank verse of more variety and vigour than we find in the baser parts of the play; and these if any scenes we may surely attribute to Shakespeare.
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