The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form spanning four lines (more properly three, in the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus, where there is no word-end before the final Adonean).
The form is two hendecasyllabic verses, and a third verse beginning the same way and continuing with five additional syllables (given as the stanza's fourth verse in ancient and modern editions, and known as the Adonic or adonean line).
Using "-" for a long syllable, "u" for a short and "x" for an "anceps" (or free syllable):
- u - x - u u - u - - - u - x - u u - u - - - u - x - u u - u - - - u u - u
While Sappho used several metrical forms for her poetry, she is most famous for the Sapphic stanza. Her poems in this meter (collected in Book I of the ancient edition) ran to 330 stanzas, a significant part of her complete works (and of her surviving poetry: fragments 1-42). It is not clear if she created it or if it was already part of the Aeolic tradition; according to Marius Victorinus (Ars grammatica 6.161 Keil), it was invented by Alcaeus but then used more frequently by, and so more strongly associated with, Sappho.
Sappho's contemporary and countryman, Alcaeus of Mytilene, also used the Sapphic stanza.
A few centuries later, the Roman poet Catullus admired Sappho's work and used the Sapphic meter in two poems, Catullus 11 and Catullus 51. The latter is a rough translation of Sappho 31. Sapphics were also used by Horace in several of his Odes, including Ode 1.22:
The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne in a poem he simply called Sapphics:
Rudyard Kipling wrote a fine tribute to William Shakespeare in Sapphics called "The Craftsman", beginning:
Allen Ginsberg also experimented with the form:
Isaac Watts penned "The Day of Judgment" subtitled An Ode Attempted in English Sapphic (here are the third and fourth stanzas):