Ballad stanza

In poetry, a ballad stanza is a type of a four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folk ballad. The ballad stanza consists of a total of four lines, with the first and third lines written in the iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines written in the iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme of ABCB. Assonance in place of rhyme is common. Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted the ballad stanza in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
 * All in a hot and copper sky!
 * The bloody Sun, at noon,
 * Right up above the mast did stand,
 * No bigger than the Moon.
 * Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , lines 111 – 114

The longer first and third lines are rarely rhymed, although at times poets may use internal rhyme in these lines.


 * In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
 * It perched for vespers nine;
 * Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
 * While the creatures crooned
 * Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, lines 75 – 78