§ =221.= It does not often happen in Middle English poetry that a line is not connected by rhyme with a corresponding line in the same stanza to which it belongs, but only with one in the next stanza. In Modern English poetry this peculiarity, corresponding to what are called _Körner_ in German metres, may not unfrequently be observed in certain poetic forms of Italian origin, as the terza rima or the sestain. Of equally rare occurrence in English strophic poetry are lines without any rhyme (analogous to the _Waisen_--literally 'orphans'--of Middle High German poetry), which were strictly prohibited in Provençal poetry. In Middle English literature they hardly ever occur, but are somewhat more frequent in Modern English poetry, where they generally come at the end of the stanza. On the other hand the mode of connecting successive stanzas, technically called _Concatenatio_ (rhyme-linking), so frequently used by the Provençal and Northern French poets, is very common in Middle English verse. Three different varieties of this device are to be distinguished, viz.: 1. The repetition of the rhyme-word (or of a word standing close by it) of the last line of a stanza, at the beginning of the first line of the following stanza. 2. The repetition of the whole last line of a stanza, including the rhyme-word, as the initial line of the following stanza (not very common); and 3. The repetition of the last rhyme of a stanza as the first rhyme of the following one; so that the last rhyme-word of one stanza and the first rhyme-word of the next not only rhyme with the corresponding rhyme-words of their own stanzas, but also with one another. Such 'concatenations' frequently connect the first and the last part (i.e. the _frons_ and the _cauda_) of a stanza with each other. They even connect the single lines of the same stanza and sometimes of a whole poem, with each other, as e.g. in the 'Rhyme-beginning Fragment' in Furnivall's _Early English Poems and Lives of Saints_, p. 21 (cf. _Metrik_, i, p. 317). § =222.= Another and more usual means of connecting the single stanzas of a poem with each other is the =refrain= (called by the Provençal poets _refrim_, i.e. 'echo'; by German metrists sometimes called _Kehrreim_, i.e. recurrent rhyme). The refrain is of popular origin, arising from the part taken by the people in popular songs or ecclesiastical hymns by repeating certain exclamations, words, or sentences at the end of single lines or stanzas. The refrain generally occurs at the end of a stanza, rarely in the interior of a stanza or in both places, as in a late ballad quoted by Ritson, _Ancient Songs and Ballads_, ii. 75.