Dizain
Quick answer: A dizain is a ten-line French poem or stanza, usually rhyming ababbccdcd, perfected by Maurice Sceve. Learn how the form works and how to write one.
A dizain is a ten-line poem or stanza from the French tradition, classically rhyming ababbccdcd with every line in the same measure, ten syllables in the French Renaissance practice, iambic pentameter in most English adaptations. The name comes from dix, ten. Compact but roomy, the dizain behaves like a sonnet with the volta built into its plumbing: two mirrored halves joined by a central couplet.
The form reached its height in sixteenth century Lyon, where Maurice Sceve composed Delie, a sequence of 449 dizains circling one beloved, a project as obsessive as any sonnet cycle. Poets pick the dizain up today for exactly that reason: it offers sonnet-like compression and argument in a shape most readers have never consciously met, familiarity's music without its predictability.
How It Works
Read the scheme as architecture: abab, then bcc, then dcd, or more symmetrically as two quatrains, ababb and ccdcd, overlapping at the centre. The bb and cc pairs in the middle, lines four to seven, form the stanza's waist, where sounds double and the poem naturally turns. Ten lines allow a genuine argument: premise, complication, and settlement. A compressed original example of the dizain's middle turn, four lines from its centre:
I kept your number after the number died, / a string of digits leading to no door; / and yet some nights I dial it like a tide / that still rehearses a demolished shore.
In a full dizain, that turn would sit at the waist, with three lines building before it and three settling after.
Where You Will See It
Maurice Sceve's Delie of 1544 is the form's cathedral, dense, emblematic love dizains that French readers rank beside Petrarch's sonnets. Clement Marot wrote lighter, wittier dizains, and the stanza also served as a building block of the grand ballade tradition. In English the dizain has led a quiet afterlife as an imported curiosity, taken up by translators of Sceve and by contemporary formalists who want a ten-line room; some modern ten-line forms, like the decima in the Spanish tradition, show sibling instincts, though their schemes differ.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Plan in threes and fours: roughly four lines to establish, the central couplet zone to turn, and the remainder to answer. Keep one metaphor in charge for all ten lines; the dizain is too small for a crowd and too large for a single glance, which makes it the perfect size for one image fully explored. English rhyme being scarcer than French, slant freely. And consider a sequence: Sceve proved the dizain gains power in accumulation, each stanza another orbit of the same obsession. A three-dizain sequence makes a distinctive contest entry, and Writory's judges see very few of them.
What poets can take from this
- Sketch the poem's argument in three moves, setup, turn, settlement, before fitting it to the rhymes.
- Let the doubled rhymes at the stanza's waist, lines four to seven, carry the poem's change of direction.
- Hold one governing image for all ten lines; the dizain rewards depth over variety.
- Use iambic pentameter with slant rhyme in English rather than forcing full rhymes on the scheme.
- Write dizains in a short sequence on one obsession; the form was born for orbiting.
Try it yourself
Write a dizain, ababbccdcd in pentameter, about an object you cannot throw away though its purpose is gone. Give the first four lines to the object, turn at the central couplets, and let the last three lines confess why it stays.
Questions
What is the rhyme scheme of a dizain?
The classic French dizain rhymes ababbccdcd across ten lines of equal measure, ten syllables in Renaissance French, usually iambic pentameter in English. The doubled rhymes in the middle create a natural turning point.
How is a dizain different from a sonnet?
A dizain has ten lines to the sonnet's fourteen and turns at its centre rather than at line nine or thirteen. Both suit compressed argument and love poetry; Sceve's dizain sequence Delie is often called the French answer to Petrarch's sonnets.
Is a dizain the same as a decima?
No, though both are ten-line stanzas. The decima belongs to the Spanish tradition, classically rhyming abbaaccddc in octosyllables and often improvised in song, while the dizain is French, rhyming ababbccdcd in ten-syllable lines.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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