All of the poems are in triadic stanza form, sometimes "with a short fourth line to fill out the measure."
Traditionalists who still wrote in fixed stanza forms were out of favor.
He also introduced the two stanza form, and made great use of contrasts between longer lines of nine characters and shorter ones of three and five.
Auden's poem is written in two different stanza forms, one form with shorter lines, the other with longer lines.
The stanza form, quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, was common to English poetry and used throughout the 16th century.
However, he worked on the four poems together and there is a unity in both their stanza forms and their themes.
Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin.
Except for the title poem, all the pieces here are in triadic stanza form (with slight exceptions), as in the opening of "The Descent":
As a poet, he often used the classic and permanent stanza forms.
Then the trope became an autonomous piece organized in stanza form.