The most popular sexain (q.v.), consisting of a heroic quatrain and couplet rhyming ababcc in iambic pentameter. Its name derives from Shakespeare’s verse epic Venus and Adonis , although it was used before Shakespeare by Surrey, Sidney, Spenser (January and December eclogues of the Shepheardes Calender ), Donne (“The Expiration”), and other Ren. poets for solemn lyrics as well as for shorter amorous and longer narrative poems: it is particularly common for complaints and epyllia. Shakespeare used it again in Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost , and other plays. Many 18-line poems of the 16th c contain three V. a. A. stanzas; some of them (many of the 100 sonnet-related poems in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia; Sidney’s Old Arcadia 46, Certain Sonnets 19; Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphoses ) seem to be larger structural imitations of the stanza form itself: two corresponding or analogous stanzas are followed by a third departing from the analogy and concluding the poem succinctly. This AA/B pattern is descended from the canzone and canso (qq.v.). The Shakespearian sonnet clearly resembles such poems in that it ends with a couplet having the same closural function. The V. a. A. stanza has been one of the most popular and superbly handled forms in Eng. and Am. poetry up to our time (7 poems by Wordsworth; John Wain, “Time Was”; Thèodore Roethke, “Four for John Davies”; Thom Gunn, “Mirror for Poets”; Robert Lowell, “April Birthday at Sea”).
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