Quaternion is a
poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
style in which the theme is divided into four parts.
Characteristics
Each part of a quaternion explores the complementary natures of the theme or subject. The word ''quaternion'' is derived from the Latin word ''quaterni'', meaning "four by four". The poem may be in any poetic form and 'offers poets the chance to experiment with varied rhetorical structures'.
Examples
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet (née Dudley; March 8, 1612 – September 16, 1672) was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in Am ...
, America's first significant poet, wrote four quaternions:
* "Four Seasons"
* "Four Elements" (Fire, Earth, Water and Air)
* "Of the Four Humours of Man's Constitution" (sanguine, pragmatic, choleric and melancholic)
* "Of the Four Ages of Man" (Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Old Age)
* "The Four Monarchies" (Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman)
Elizabeth Daryush
Elizabeth Daryush (8 December 1887 – 7 April 1977) was an English poet.
Life
Daryush was the daughter of Robert Bridges; her maternal grandfather was Alfred Waterhouse. She married Ali Akbar Daryush, a Persian government official whom sh ...
, known for her
syllabic verse
Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syl ...
, used the quaternion form in her poem "Accentedal".
['Biography of Elizabeth Daryush' MyPoeticSide.com]
References
External links
Quaternion examples
Poetic forms
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