PROCELEUSMATIC.--A double pyrrhic, or foot of four short syllables (̆ ̆ ̆ ̆). Not needed, if not also impossible, in English.
PYRRHIC.--Foot of two short syllables (̆ ̆). Very doubtfully found in English; but not impossible.
QUANTITY.--That which fits a syllable for its place as "long" or "short" in a verse.
QUARTET or QUATRAIN.--A group of four lines usually, indeed with the rarest exceptions, united in themselves, and separated from others, by rhyme.
REDUNDANCE.--An extra syllable at the end of the line, not strictly part of its last foot.
REFRAIN.--A line recurring identically, or with very slight alteration, at the end of every stanza of a poem. Probably one of the oldest of all poetic features--certainly one of the oldest in English. The same as "burden." Refrains or burdens are not uncommonly meaningless collections of musical-sounding words.
RHYME.--The arrangement of two word-endings--identical in vowel and following consonant or consonants, but not having the same consonant _before_ the vowel--at the conclusion of two or more lines, or sometimes within the lines themselves.
RHYME-ROYAL.--The stanza of seven decasyllabic lines, rhymed _ababbcc_, which occurs in Chaucer's _Troilus_, and which traditionally derives its name from its use in _The King's Quair_, though its extreme popularity for a long period is perhaps the real reason.
RHYTHM.--An orderly arrangement, but not necessarily a correspondent succession, of sounds.
RIDING RHYME.--An old name for the decasyllabic couplet, obviously derived from its appearance in Chaucer's Tales of Pilgrims "riding" to Canterbury.
RIME COUÉE or TAILED RHYME.--Translations in French and English of the Latin _versus caudatus_, and not very happy from the English point of view, though justified by origin (see Origin-List). The verse to which they refer is the sixain of two eights, a six, two more eights, and another six. Two tails are not common in English _fauna_; and one might prefer to call the verse "waisted and tailed." It is, however, in the old Romances (where it is common, and from its commonness in which it is better called the "Romance-six") often found in multiples of three other than six; and it is at the batch of three that the title looks--the couplet of eights constituting the body, and the odd six the tail.