The unit of metre is the foot or measure . Unrhymed iambic pentameter is known as blank verse . Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost , Wordsworth's Prelude and Tennyson's Idylls of the King are all written in blank verse. A line in iambic hexameter , or having twelve syllables is known as an alexandrine , apparently because some old French geezer wrote a poem about Alexander the Great using this metre. Used by Dante in The Divine Comedy .
Ballad form means iambic verse with the the second and fourth lines rhyming.
These have three feet, whereas the first and third lines have four feet. Envelope form means quatrains in iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme abba . Elegiac stanzas or heroic quatrains means iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme abab . This is the verse form of Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement. So named because this was the verse form of Spenser's The Faerie Queen .