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A quatrain is a poem or a stanza within a poem consisting of four lines of prose. It is the most common stanza form in European poetry. A quatrain is often comprised of alternate rhymes. When alternate rhyme is used, the first and third lines rhyme, as do the second and fourth lines, forming a pattern referred to as ABAB. However, many different rhyme schemes are found within quatrains, which rely on varying rhythmic structures, or meters. The most common meter used in quatrains is the iambic pentameter, which consists of a line ten syllables long that is accented on the second beat of each syllable.

Terza rima is a rhyme scheme that uses an interlocking pattern of rhymed three-line stanzas. The end-word in the middle line supplies the rhyme for the first and third lines of the next stanza. Thus, the rhyme scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe) continues through the end of the poem. Terza rima is most famously associated with the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who used it in his epic poem, The Divine Comedy (La divina commedia, ca. 1320); although scholars are divided as to whether Dante invented the rhyme scheme or adapted it from an earlier form. Poets writing in English from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer to the twenty-first century have used terza rima in their poems, and others have used it for translations of The Divine Comedy in part or whole. Typically, the terza rima line is iambic; in English, the iambic pentameter line dominates, although variations have been used. Because rhyming in English is more difficult than rhyming in Italian, rhymes in English are often near or slant rhymes. More rarely have poets attempted a kind of free verse form of the rhyme scheme.