Quatrain

The quatrain is a four-line stanza, the most widespread in European and Ukrainian poetry, admitting all three principal rhyme schemes: adjacent (aabb), alternate (abab) and envelope (abba). The versatility of the quatrain is explained by its balance: four lines are sufficient to unfold and complete a single semantic unit without overloading the stanza. The quatrain is a building block of many fixed forms, notably the sonnet, whose first eight lines form two quatrains. The flexibility of rhyming and the possibility of alternating different clausulae make the four-line stanza extraordinarily productive. A vast part of classical and contemporary Ukrainian lyric is written precisely in quatrains of varied metrical and rhyme structure.