AustLit

Author note: Poulter's Measure is a verse form popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It consists of a series of rhyming couplets, the first line being an Alexandrine (an iambic line of six feet or twelve syllables), and the second a septenarius (an iambic line of seven feet or fourteen syllables.) The name is said to come from the habit of poulterers of selling sometimes twelve and sometimes thirteen eggs to the dozen. I have taken the normal metrical licence of an occasional extra short syllable. The metre is deprecated by C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, OUP 1973 pp. 232-3.