In poetry, a ballad stanza is a type of a four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folk ballad. The ballad stanza consists of a total of four lines, with the first and third lines written in the iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines written in the iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme of ABCB. Assonance in place of rhyme is common. Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted the ballad stanza in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
:All in a hot and copper sky!
:The bloody Sun, at noon,
:Right up above the mast did stand,
:No bigger than the Moon.
:::Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', lines 111 – 114
The longer first and third lines are rarely rhymed, although at times poets may use internal rhyme in these lines.
:In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
:It perched for vespers nine;
:Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
:While the creatures crooned
:::Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, lines 75 – 78
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