Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
Michael Drayton's "Ballad of Agincourt", first published in 1605, offers a simple English example, rhymed AAABCCCB; the shorter (dimeter) B-lines form the 'tail' lines and appear at regular intervals among the longer (trimeter) lines: Fair stood the wind for France, When we our sails advance, Nor now to prove our chance, Longer will tarry; But putting to the main, At Caux, the mouth of Seine, With all his martial train, Landed King Harry.
AABAAB tail rhyme is the form of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Conquerors": Round the wide earth, from the red field your valor has won, Blown with the breath of the far-speaking gun, Goes the word.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott" uses an AAAABCCCB structure, with the second tail line repeated throughout as a refrain: Willows whiten, aspens shiver.
Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear,— Swift be thy flight!
The Middle English romance Sir Perceval of Galles is written in sixteen-line AAABCCCBDDDBEEEB stanzas: Lef, lythes to me Two wordes or thre, Of one that was faire and fre And felle in his fighte.
[4][5] The most recent sustained study suggests that tail rhyme began as an imitation of the so-called "Victorine sequence" associated with the twelfth-century poet Adam of Saint Victor and used in a great many Latin hymns.
The chronicle of Peter Langtoft reports and quotes various tail rhyme popular songs on historical events in both Middle English and Anglo-Norman.
A rare exception to the generally moral or devotional cast of earlier tail rhyme verse occurs in the thirteenth-century Middle English fabliau Dame Sirith.
Due to its content, its tail rhyme form, and the negative reaction of the fictional audience, Sir Thopas is often interpreted as a parody, either affectionate or satirical, of other Middle English romances.
Occasionally, poets have resurrected the tradition of longer heroic narratives in tail rhyme in conscious acts of medievalism: one example is Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tale of Balen, which retells the story of Sir Balin from Thomas Malory's prose Morte d'Arthur in AAAABCCCB stanzas.