isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott. (1832 version, lines 10–18) Further variation in the arrangement of rhymes is possible. Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "To Night" offers a complex example, in which the tail lines come second and last in a seven-line stanza, and the fourth line shares their rhyme but stays full-length (ABABCCB). Despite its unusual arrangement, this poem is usually admitted as an example of tail rhyme. Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear,— Swift be thy flight! (lines 1–7) In the first few centuries of its popularity, tail rhyme structures could grow to considerably greater lengths. The Middle English romance Sir Perceval of Galles is written in sixteen-line AAABCCCBDDDBEEEB stanzas: Lef, lythes to me Two wordes or thre, Of one that was faire and fre And felle in his fighte. His righte name was Percyvell, He was fosterde in the felle, He dranke water of the welle, And yitt was he wyghte. His fadir was a noble man; Fro the tyme that he began, Miche wirchippe he wan When he was made knyghte In Kyng Arthures haulle. Beste byluffede of alle, Percyvell thay gan hym calle, Whoso redis ryghte. (lines 1–16) In somewhat anachronistic modern terms, the main lines in this stanza are in trimeter while the tail lines are in dimeter. History Origins Tail rhyme stanzas emerge in Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. No surviving treatises from the period explicitly discuss tail rhyme's construction or its origins, so estimates must be made from examining the surviving texts themselves. This task is complicated by the fact that tail rhyme is a simple formal principle, and might have been invented in multiple places at multiple times. The most recent sustained study suggests that tail rhyme began as an imitation of the so-called "Victorine sequence" associated with the twelfth-century poet Adam of Saint Victor, and used in a great many Latin hymns. The widely-popular thirteenth-century hymn Stabat mater dolorosa exemplifies a Victorine sequence: Stabat mater dolorosa iuxta Crucem lacrimosa, dum pendebat Filius. Cuius animam gementem, contristatam et dolentem pertransivit gladius. (lines 1–6) Though the exact arrangement of syllables in Victorine verse varied, Stabat mater demonstrates the most typical arrangement: lines rhymed AABCCB, the main lines being octosyllabic (eight syllables long) and