Cinquain, also known as "quintain," can--like the word "quatrain"for a four-line stanza--refer to any stanza of five lines. But largely because of one poet's (Adelaide Crapsey's) use of it as a haiku-like single-stanza poem, it acquired a distinctive (if obscure) identity: a five-line iambic or syllabic poem with a syllable pattern of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2.

                Triad

      These be
      Three silent things:
      The falling snow . . . the hour
      Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one
      Just dead.
                                 --Adelaide Crapsey

            LISTEN . . .
            With faint dry sound,
            Like steps of passing ghosts,
            The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
            And fall.
                                -- Adelaide Crapsey

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