Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A stanza or poem of four lines.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A stanza of four lines riming alternately.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Pros.) A stanza of four lines rhyming alternately.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun a
poem in four lines - noun a
stanza of four lines
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a stanza of four lines
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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It starts promisingly enough, with the gypsy Maleva's famous quatrain from the original: "Even a man who is pure in heart/And says his prayers by night/May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms/And the autumn moon is bright."
MOVIE REVIEW: The Wolfman Directed by Joe Johnston (2010) 2010
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The meaning of that quatrain is clearer than the first lines of the poem: “The bottoms of autumn/Wear diamonds of frost.”
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This quatrain is fresh and memorable partly because inverts the traditional image: The wise men who once brought gifts to the Christ Child are themselves “borne as gifts.”
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This quatrain is fresh and memorable partly because inverts the traditional image: The wise men who once brought gifts to the Christ Child are themselves “borne as gifts.”
Are You Smart Enough to Understand Geoffrey Hill? « One-Minute Book Reviews 2007
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I was inclined to follow the more familiar term quatrain straight ahead until I caught the "sextrain" but no such luck.
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Some anthologies – not many – include the early sonnet to his brothers, whose hushed first quatrain is a paragon of detail-work and scene-setting:
small, busy flames : Stephen Burt : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007
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The word quatrain comes from Latin and it means four.
A Quatrain in the afternoon Chirayu 2005
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If we are to have a mere arbitrary arrangement of the sonnet, why not the same in a poem of regular or inverted quatrains, or of the Persian quatrain, which is now always given in this form: --
The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers Various 1904
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In the third stanza, I consider the middle quatrain, that is, the four lines beginning “Out of this world,” perfectly grand.
England's Antiphon MacDonald, George, 1824-1905 1868
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Ionic a minore is itself, I need not say, the metre of a single Ode in the Third Book, the "Miserarum est," and I have devised a stanza for it, taking much more pains with the apportionment of the ictus than in the case of the trochaic quatrain, which is better able to modulate itself.
The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace 65 BC-8 BC Horace 1847
bilby commented on the word quatrain
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khwatrain
A stanza or poem of four lines,
A stanza of four lines riming alternately.
A poem in four lines,
A stanza of four lines.
June 23, 2012