Wheel (poetry)

A wheel was a stanza in Old English alliterative verse.

Form
As used, for example, by the Pearl Poet in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the wheel was a short four-line stanza of internally rhyming alliterative verse, that followed a stanza and served as either a summary of or an ironic commentary on it. The wheel was joined to the stanza by a short one-beat line called a bob; together, the technique was known as the bob and wheel.