tail-rhyme stanza

tail‐rhyme stanza, a stanza that combines longer lines with two or more short lines or ‘tails’. Several English verse romances of the late Middle Ages use a twelve‐line stanza rhyming aabccbddbeeb or aabaabccbddb, with the lines ending in the b‐rhyme having three stresses, the other lines having four. Chaucer's parody, the Tale of Sir Thopas, uses a six‐line version of this, rhyming aabaab in some stanzas, aabccb in others. Tail‐rhyme is also known as caudate rhyme (the tail being a ‘cauda’ or ‘coda’), and in French as rime couée.