Décima

or espinela (named after the 16th-century Spanish poet V. Espinel, to whom its creation is ascribed), a fixed stanzaic form of ten lines that rhyme abbaaccddc. The classical poetic rules for the décima require a stop (period) after the fourth and sixth verses; the first quatrain contains the statement of the theme, the last its resolution, and the two lines in between serve as the transition. It is widely employed in Spanish poetry, including in the verse form called the gloss. In Russian versification the rhythmic pattern of the décima is most accurately rendered by trochaic tetrameter.