If lines two and four are lengthened so that the entire stanza consists of tetrameter lines, the stanza is called long measure . When all the lines are of pentameter length, the quatrain is called either heroic or elegaic , depending upon the subject matter treated by the poem and the poem's tone. Another important quatrain is the Sapphic , named so because it was used by the Greek poet Sappho. It has the same ABAB rhyme scheme of the preceding quatrains, but the music of the stanza is very different because one arrives so quickly at the fourth rhyme. Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air In his own ground.
Limericks often treat rather horrible subjects in frivolous ways.
Seven line stanzas are sometimes called a septet , and eight lines stanzas are sometimes known as an octave or an octet . His most celebrated poem in this form is Troilus and Criseyde . This form, however, has rarely been used since the Renaissance, at which time its prestige as a complex stanzaic form was superseded by that of ottava rima . The longest fixed form stanza in English is the Spenserian stanza , named after Edmund Spenser, whose immense, unfinished poem The Faerie Queene is composed of these nine-line stanzas. It is a complex form and a difficult one to manage.