elegiac stanza

American

noun

a four-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming alternately.

elegiac stanza British

noun

prosody a quatrain in iambic pentameters with alternate lines rhyming

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

We are much afraid that the tendency of the present age towards the facetious has contributed not a little to the dearth of sonnets and the extermination of the elegiac stanza.

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 by Various

A quatrain consisting of iambic pentameter verse with alternate rhymes is called an elegiac stanza.

From Composition-Rhetoric by Brooks, Stratton D.

The poem being in the elegiac stanza, Dryden relapsed into an imitation of "Gondibert," from which he had departed ever since the "Elegy on Cromwell."

From The Dramatic Works of John Dryden, Volume 1 With a Life of the Author by Saintsbury, George

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023