Quintain
Quick answer: A quintain is any five-line stanza or poem, from the limerick to the tanka. Learn common quintain rhyme schemes and how to use five lines effectively.
A quintain is a stanza or poem of five lines. The term, sometimes given as quintet or cinquain in its loose sense, covers every five-line arrangement regardless of meter or rhyme, from the limerick's gallop to the tanka's hush to Shelley's soaring skylark stanza. Five lines is an odd, generous number: room for a full quatrain's worth of development plus one extra line that must justify itself.
That extra line is the quintain's whole personality. Wherever it falls in the scheme, it unbalances the expected symmetry of four, and poets choose five-line stanzas precisely for that surplus, a line for the afterthought, the twist, the echo, or the door left open. If quatrains feel like rooms, quintains feel like rooms with one window too many, in the best way.
How It Works
There is no single quintain scheme, but several famous wirings exist. The limerick runs AABBA in bouncing rhythm. The Sicilian quintain, ABABA, extends alternating rhyme one beat further than expected. Edmund Waller's 'Go, Lovely Rose' uses ABABB, doubling the final rhyme for a closing push. Shelley's 'To a Skylark' stanza sets four short lines against a long fifth that opens like a wing. An original unrhymed example showing the fifth line's power:
Four of us carried the wardrobe down the stairs, / turned it, cursed it, blessed the empty street. / It stood on the pavement like a confession. / Nobody spoke about whose clothes it held. / Then rain, and all of us suddenly gentle.
Lines one to four make a complete scene; line five changes the temperature. That is the quintain doing its signature work.
Where You Will See It
Five-line units are everywhere once you start counting. The Japanese tanka, thirty-one sounds in five phrases, is often printed as five lines in English. Edward Lear industrialised the limerick. Poe's 'To Helen' opens in five-line stanzas, Waller's rose poem became a touchstone of the English lyric quintain, and Larkin, Plath, and Heaney all wrote celebrated poems in five-line stanzas, rhymed and not. American schoolrooms know the form through the syllabic cinquain, which has its own stricter definition and its own glossary entry.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Draft in quatrains, then ask what each stanza is not saying, and give that to a fifth line. Decide whether your fifth line completes the pattern, ABABB style, or breaks it, and keep that behaviour consistent so the reader learns the stanza's rules. In unrhymed work, try making the fifth line shorter or longer than the rest, a visible surplus. The quintain suits poems about excess, remainder, and what will not fit, subjects that rhyme with its shape.
What poets can take from this
- Give the fifth line a consistent job across stanzas: twist, echo, or landing.
- Try the Sicilian ABABA when you want a stanza that chimes but refuses to close like a couplet.
- Vary line lengths so the five-line block does not read as a quatrain with a trailer.
- Study a limerick and a tanka side by side to feel the range five lines can cover.
- If your quintains keep collapsing into quatrain plus leftover, cut the weakest line and see if the poem wanted quatrains after all.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in four five-line stanzas about packing up a house, in which every stanza's first four lines handle objects and the fifth line handles what objects cannot hold.
Questions
What is the difference between a quintain and a cinquain?
Quintain is the general term for any five-line stanza or poem. Cinquain can be used the same way, but it usually refers to the specific syllabic form invented by Adelaide Crapsey, five lines of two, four, six, eight, and two syllables.
Is a limerick a quintain?
Yes. A limerick is a five-line poem rhyming AABBA in a rollicking anapaestic rhythm, which makes it the most famous comic member of the quintain family.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.