Tutorial: The Quatrain.
Keeping with the natural progression of simple to complex, we now continue with the next portion of our lover's chain: the quatrain. A quatrain is a poem or verse consisting of four lines, with no rhyme scheme or syllable count dictated by the form itself. You can go with any rhyme scheme that suits your fancy -- AAAA, BBBB, ABAB, ABCD (which would be blank verse), etc.
Since we're trying to be vaguely traditional with this chain, I've settled on the classical ABAB scheme. This means that the first line with rhyme with the third line, while the second line will rhyme with the fourth line. The internal rhymes were fun in the triplet, but they don't work as well in a quatrain -- part of the point of the pure quatrain is simplicity.
Our already established images include time, death and flowers, and, to a certain degree, the turning seasons. Considering this, our first two lines will be:
The bitter breath of winter blows
Across the fading fields;
This gives us an A rhyme of 'blows', and a B rhyme of 'fields'. These are good words: not too cliched, but still fairly easy to rhyme. And again, we're keeping things just loose enough to look very emotionally 'real', and heart-felt. When poetry looks forced, you have a problem.
Now, the scansion is uneven -- line one has eight syllables, while line two only has six. Considering this, we wind up with a third line that reads:
Yet love may bloom beneath the snows
Great. There's our love, and even more of the flower imagery that we've been trying to use throughout the lover's chain. One more line to go, and without any internal rhymes to worry about, we can just be straightforward:
To bring a summer's yields.
Whenever possible, end with a note of hope, or rebirth. This is love poetry, not angsty 'I hate the world' high school poetry. Our finished quatrain reads:
The bitter breath of winter blows
Across the fading fields;
Yet love may bloom beneath the snows
To bring a summer's yields.
We're still keeping that loose, feminine rhyme scheme that we started in the earlier poems, and while our imagery is becoming richer and deeper, it isn't getting any more complex. This is a good thing -- past a certain point, it can get really hard to juggle your images. This doesn't mean that you can't allow organic evolution in your imagery. It just means that you should be careful.