only wrote one poem in tail rhyme, the tale of Sir Thopas in the Canterbury Tales. This is the first tale told by Chaucer's fictionalised version of himself within the frame narrative of the Tales, and it is received poorly by the other pilgrims. Due to its content, its tail rhyme form, and the negative reaction of the fictional audience, Sir Thopas is often interpreted as a parody, either affectionate or satirical, of other Middle English romances. Poets writing in Middle English who regarded themselves as followers or successors of Chaucer, such as Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, adopted other aspects of Chaucerian verse form, such as early iambic pentameter and the rhyme royal stanza, but did not write in tail rhyme, possibly indicating that for them the form was associated with popular and lesser romances. Modern English use In the sixteenth century, tail rhyme romance continued to circulate in manuscript and early print in England and Scotland. However, the production of sustained narratives in tail rhyme dropped off, and tail rhyme forms were once more predominantly found in short poems rather than as the backbone forms of long stories. The favoured tail rhyme stanza forms, too, also shortened, with fewer examples of the twelve- and sixteen-line tail rhyme stanzas that had proved successful in Middle English. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the most popular tail rhyme stanza was AABCCB, with the main lines in tetrameter and the B-lines in either trimeter or dimeter. Poets who have used tail rhyme include Edmund Spenser ("March" in The Shepheardes Calender), Michael Drayton ("Ballad of Agincourt", quoted above), William Wordsworth ("To the Daisy" and "The Green Linnet', both AAABCCCB) and Robert Burns, in his numerous poems using the "Burns stanza". Occasionally, poets have resurrected the tradition of longer heroic narratives in tail rhyme in conscious acts of medievalism: one example is Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tale of Balen, which retells the story of Sir Balin from Thomas Malory's prose Morte d'Arthur in AAAABCCCB stanzas. References Poetic forms Rhyme Stanzaic form