quat·rain : a stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes.
To an Athlete Dying Young
A. E. Housman
1859–1936
At first glance nothing seems more unlikely than that the poet of the enormously popular A Shropshire Ladshould be the classical scholar A. E. Housman. This Cambridge University professor of Latin left no doubt as to his priorities: the emendation of classical texts was both an intellectual search for the truth and his life’s work; poetry was an emotional and physiological experience that began with a sensation in the pit of the stomach. The apparent discrepancies in this man who became both a first-rate scholar and a celebrated poet should be a reminder that, whatever else poetry does, it also records the interior life, a life that has its roots well beneath the academic gown or the business suit. Furthermore, in Housman’s case, though he did aspire to be a great scholar first, scrutiny of his life and work reveals that he valued poetry more highly than he often admitted and that many of the presumed conflicts between the classical scholar and the romantic poet dissolve in the personality of the man.
Dr.Seuss’s book title is an example of a quatrain, it has the four stanzas and the rhythm to go along with it.