Decasyllabic Quatrain - Heroic Quatrain

Heroic Quatrain

The decasyllabic quatrain with an alternating rhyme scheme is often referred to as the "heroic quatrain", the "heroic stanza" or the "four-line stave". It came to prominence in the poem Nosce Teipsum by Sir John Davies in 1599. Although the use of ten-syllable lines had existed long before Davies's poems, the most common usage for the decasyllabic form was in the heroic couplet, where two lines of iambic pentameter were composed with a rhyme scheme that caused the vowel sound at the end of each line to correspond with the vowel sound of the line immediately following it. Hence, a quatrain formed of heroic couplets would have a scheme of AABB. However, Nosce teipsum used a variation of the form wherein the couplets were separated by interjected lines, causing the scheme to gain complexity.

Following the publication of Nosce Teipsum, other poets in the English language also began to break free from the heroic couplet in their longer works. In 1556, William Davenant began to write his poem Gondibert, which was intended to contain five parts, similar to a five act play. In letter to Davenant, Thomas Hobbes, whom Davenant had met in Paris as a Royalist in exile, stated that he believed the poetic form Davenant intended to use in his poem would greatly change the course of poetry by opening up new possibilities for poetic expression. However, Hobbes freely admitted that he knew little about poetry before he attempted to explain his thoughts on literary theory. While Hobbes praised Davenant's intention to write a poem of the scope of Gondibert, the work was never completed, and Davenant's most significant contribution to the development of the form came from his influence on Dryden, who would prove to be the decasyllabic quatrain's most prominent practitioner.

When Dryden published Annus Mirabilis in 1667, the form he used for the long poem was that of the decasyllabic quatrain. The poem achieved prominence quickly, as it discussed the year of 1666, during which many disasters had plagued the people of England. The poem contained 1216 lines of verse in 304 stanzas, each with a period at the end to show a "completeness" in each stanza. While the form had achieved fame with other poets of Dryden's era and was considered "fashionable" by figures of the literary world, Dryden's poem quickly became known as the standard-bearer of the genre.