The sampler includes a six-line religious verse, below which appears two baskets of fruit on either side of a stylized Quaker schoolhouse with five windows, which is set in a pastoral landscape featuring two trees, a lawn with sheep, and a woman, four children, a dog, and a deer.
The haiku form is based on the "upper verse"; another form, called a renga, is made from alternating the two — first a three-line, seventeen syllable verse, then a two-line, fourteen syllable one, each by a different poet for up to a hundred verses!
The bonnie broon-hair'd lassie o' Bonnie Dundee". McGonagall could not have kept such rhythm going for the length of a couplet, never mind the skilful nine-line verses of this poem, nor was he capable of so neatly combining the charms of girl and town.
Frottola texts were usually of limited literary value, typically consisting of several six-line verses, each followed by a four-line refrain, using the same music.
The square is the dominant configuration in Scully's abstracts, and the same shape – representing neat agricultural fields and the dimensions of a four-line stanza – recurs throughout Heaney's verse, overlapping, in a sequence called Squarings, with a type of throw used in a children's game of marbles.
This verse, beginning "We give them honour and song", is more effective if read as a three-line stanza, ending on "But the old inherit the earth".
A difficult eight-line unit of 11-syllable verses that are linked by a tight rhyme scheme, the octava real was a challenge few poets met.
''Wolf Watch,'' by Kay Winters, also follows the early days of a litter of pups but delivers its straightforward plot by way of manageable four-line stanzas of verse.
Headless line, also called acephalous line, in prosody, a line of verse that is lacking the normal first syllable.
It includes almost every known poetic metre, from doggerel through terza rima to six-foot trimetre (a line of verse consisting of three measures), and a number of styles ranging from Greek tragedy through medieval mystery, baroque allegory, Renaissance masque, and commedia dell'arte to something akin to the modern revue.
