Tail Rhyme
Quick answer: Tail rhyme is a stanza pattern where short lines rhyme together after longer rhymed lines, as in AABCCB. Explore its medieval roots and modern uses.
Tail rhyme is a stanza pattern in which short lines, the tails, rhyme with each other while following groups of longer rhymed lines, most familiarly in the shape AABCCB, where the B lines are shorter than the rest. The French name, rime couee, means exactly that: tailed rhyme. Each short line dangles after its longer companions like the tail after a kite, and because the tails rhyme only with each other, they bind the stanza across its middle.
The form dominated medieval English romance, and it survives because the tails do useful work: they create a lilt, a pause, and a place for punchlines. Poets still borrow the shape whenever they want a stanza that trots forward and then tips its hat.
How It Works
Take two long lines rhyming together, add a short tail, then repeat with new long rhymes and a second tail that rhymes with the first. Here is an original stanza in the classic AABCCB arrangement: The winter market closes late, its lanterns swinging by the gate, then dark comes down. The stallers pack their crates of pears, call out goodnights across the squares, and leave the town.
The short lines carry the stanza's memory. Because down must wait three lines for town, the reader holds a small expectation open, and the click of its closure gives tail rhyme its distinctive satisfaction.
Where You Will See It
Middle English romances such as Sir Launfal ran on tail-rhyme stanzas, so relentlessly that Chaucer parodied the whole tradition in his deliberately terrible Tale of Sir Thopas, where the galloping tails become a joke about hack poetry. Christopher Smart chose an intricate tail-rhyme stanza for A Song to David. A close cousin, the six-line Burns stanza with its two short tails, powers To a Mouse and much of Robert Burns's best-loved work. Hymnody kept related shapes alive well into the nineteenth century.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Give the tails the important words. Because the short lines stand apart rhythmically, whatever you put in them gets underlined for free: a turn, a verdict, a refrain-like image. If your tails merely fill space, the stanza sags.
Vary the sentence flow against the pattern. Let one sentence stop at a tail and the next pour past it, so the form never hardens into sing-song. Tail rhyme rewards poets who can keep the trot lively for a whole narrative, which makes it a fine choice for story poems.
What poets can take from this
- Put your strongest images or turns in the short tail lines, where the form naturally shines a light.
- Keep tail lines noticeably shorter than the main lines, usually by two beats, so the shape stays audible.
- Run some sentences past the tails to avoid a nursery-rhyme jog.
- Try the AABCCB shape first; add more couplets before each tail once you are comfortable.
- Read Chaucer's Sir Thopas to learn, by cheerful bad example, every trap the form sets.
Try it yourself
Tell the story of a small local legend from your home town in four tail-rhyme stanzas of AABCCB, making every B line reveal something the longer lines tried to hide.
Questions
What is the difference between tail rhyme and a refrain?
A refrain repeats the same words at intervals, while tail rhyme repeats a structural position: short lines that rhyme with each other. The tails can say something new every stanza; only their length and rhyme link them.
Is the Burns stanza a form of tail rhyme?
Yes. The Burns stanza, or standard Habbie, rhymes AAABAB with short fourth and sixth lines, so its two short lines act as tails. It descends from the medieval tail-rhyme tradition.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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