Elegiac Decasyllabic Quatrain
In 1751, Thomas Gray published "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", composed in the heroic stanza. Written in iambic pentameter, the poem followed the same metrical and structural patterns seen in Annus Mirabilis, but the use of the poetic form in an elegy gave it the title of the "elegiac decasyllabic quatrain". Other writers of Gray's time also wrote heroic stanzas about topics similar to those in Elegy, such as Thomas Warton in Pleasures of Melancholy and William Collins in Ode to Evening. While the topic chosen for these quatrains appealed to the novel literary devices of Gray's period with emphasis on melancholy and by taking place in the evening, Gray's contemporaries did not believe that the heroic quatrain, which was commonly used in the era, was dramatically changed or altered in the poems.
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Famous quotes containing the word quatrain:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)