An Italian stanzaic form, used by Dante in his Divina Commedia, consisting of tercets with interwoven rhymes, aba bcb dcd efe ... and a concluding couplet rhyming with the penultimate line of the last tercet.
The original Italian form was iambic pentameter, plus one syllable. Examples in English are Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Of the Mean and the Sure Estate," Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," and Robert Browning's "The Statue and the Bust."