In poetry, a ballad stanza is a type of a four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folk ballad. The ballad stanza consists of a total of four lines, with the first and third lines written in the iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines written in the iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme of ABCB. Assonance in place of rhyme is common. Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted the ballad stanza in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.All in a hot and copper sky! The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, lines 111 – 114