The pantoum (the OED actually likes pantun -- it's from the Malaysian, but the form is frequently imitated in French and English) has a little trick to it -- besides just being in the form abab bcbc cdcd and so on, there's also a division between the first two and the second two lines of each stanza, so you get this bifurcation across stanzas. Hollander (in Rhyme's Reason) calls it maddening, but really it's what gives the poem so much metaphoric power. Also, it makes the poem easier to craft (at least from the standpoint of getting some sense out of the lines) because you can focus on all the first pairs (of all the stanzas) first, and then all the second pairs.
One thing about this form irritates me though -- it's the lack of symmetry (this is the same thing, by the way, that bugs me about the villanelle, although that's an even less symmetrical form, and therefore less irritating in its failure to be symmetrical) at the end of the poem. You have abab bcbc cdcd dede efef fafa -- except the order of the a's in the last stanza is different from the order in the first. The point of this is to make the first line reprise as the last, but it destroys the potential for a loop. (Is a loop even symmetry? I suppose it's a kind of rotational symmetry.)
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