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Inpoetry, a ballad stanza is a type of a four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folk ballad. The ballad stanza consists of a total of four lines, with the first and third lines written in the iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines written in the iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme of ABCB.[1][2][3] Assonance in place of rhyme is common.[citation needed] Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted the ballad stanza in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The longer first and third lines are rarely rhymed, although at times poets may use internal rhyme in these lines.