The quatrain is the cardboard box of English poetry. (Yes, this is the metaphor of an academic moving offices.) You fold four lines together, secure them with rhyme, and pop: you’ve got a carton to carry your ballad / hymn / other lyric as far as it needs to go.
How, though, to square my box-lugging thought with John Dryden’s view that quatrains are ‘more noble, and of greater dignity […] than any other verse in use amongst us’?
Well, the quatrain’s carrying capacity is what appealed to Dryden too:
I have always found the couplet verse most easy […] for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labour of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together. For those who write correctly in this kind must needs acknowledge that the last line of the stanza is to be considered in the composition of the first.
The ‘troublesome sense’ carrying of the quatrain, we might say, makes it a more carefully thought-through poetic space than the couplet.
A contemporary virtuoso of the four-line stanza is Ian Duhig. His New and Selected Poems (Picador) employs the quatrain as one its regular forms, right up to the final poem, ‘The Parting Glass’ — a beautifully poised elegy for an Irish singer, Brian Davey, who left the violence of 1960s Belfast for Leeds, where he became ‘Carrickfergus’ Bernard Davey, a ‘builder without cards’.
The second stanza compresses the damage of that life into two lines:
Here, relabelled bipolar, his house of no cards fell:
he couldn’t leave the civil war as as easily as names
I’m full of admiration for how much this elegy says about Davey in such a small space, carrying its conceit of a ‘house of no cards’ through to the final stanza, which punningly honours his workmanship (‘taking panes’) but implicitly honours the singer of a lost homeland:
I remember him fixing our front room windows,
shuffling decks of glass, from struts taking panes.
I remember how utterly cold invaded my home
until he made it just a picture in its frame again.
Here is Dryden’s nobility and dignity.
Bernard Davey, the poem notes, wasn’t from Carrickfergus, but was famed for his performance of that ballad — a folk song whose quatrains seem to have been carried haphazardly down the years, until the actor Peter O’Toole sang two verses to Dominic Behan, who expanded and recorded them in 1960 as ‘The Kerry Boat Song’.
You read the whole of ‘The Parting Glass’ here; read more about the history of ‘Carrickfergus’ here; and hear Brian/Bernard Davey singing his signature tune here.