Ottava rima
Ottava rima rhymes abababcc, and numerous medieval and Renaissance Italian poems were composed in this stanza pattern. Notable are the long narratives of Bocaccio, such as the Filostrato, the source for Chaucer's, Troilus and Criseyde. In English, the name implies an iambic pentameter poem in that form. It has served numerous purposes, from Byron's cynically witty Don Juan to the stylistically magnificent later poems of W. B. Yeats.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
from "Sailing To Byzantium"
--W. B. Yeats
Rime Royal
Rime royal is so called because King James I of Scotland employed it in The Kingis Quair. (It does not much resemble the French chant royal.) Chaucer, however, was its most skillful practitioner, using it for the entirety of Troilus and Criseyde, as well as "The Clerk's Tale" and elsewhere; he managed to adapt it for all kinds of purposes, from dialogue to narrative, and description to passionate love lyrics. Rime royal consists of seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc. It is close to the stanzas of the ballade, with which it may have some connection, and also to what Chaucer used in his Monk's Tale. The Spenserian stanza may well be a further development of it.
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
"They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me
Seek" --Thomas Wyatt
The Pantoum
The pantoum is a Malay verse form in which the second and fourth lines of each
four-line stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next. Some French poets in the
later nineteenth century used it, although the example below does not fit the paradigm
just described. Some American poets of the later twentieth century have given it a try,
including John Ashbery, who explained that it provides twice as much poem for the same
effort because of the repetition. This may be of more advantage to the poet than the
reader.
Walking Tour
Walking a land of white stones
I breathe the silence that became a nation.
Ghostly taps play the shape of leaves
when ordered ranks pass slowly in review
I breathe the silence that became a nation
where streets are washed with the liquid of despair
when ordered ranks pass slowly in review
marching to generals of promised oblivion.
Where streets are washed with the liquid of despair
amid homes too frail to vanquish the night.
Marching to generals of promised oblivion
thirty miles and a world away.
Amid homes too frail to vanquish the night
frightened squads rehearse their own demise.
Thirty miles and a world away
I walk a land of white stones.
--Deane
P. Goodwin
Sonnet
Note: The word, "sonnet," comes from the Italian for "little song." This poetic form addresses he development of a single idea by presenting a problem, and then solving it or declaring it insoluble. A situation may be presented, and then interpreted. A sonnet moves in one direction and then reverses.
Sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, or five stresses and five non-stressed syllables per line, taking up five feet, as:
da DA da DA da DA da DA da DA
Italian Sonnet
This form consists of an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines). The octave sets up the poem by presenting a problem, desire, or vision. The sestet presents the "volta," or turn of thought, and seeks to solve the problem or conflict. In many traditional sonnets, the octave presented the individual will or ego, and then yielded to the divine in the sestet.
The Italian sonnet never rhymes the closing couplet, and traditionally has the following rhyme scheme. The sestet scheme can be varied in one of two ways as shown below. Modern writers take liberty with the elements of the sonnet, but a poem written in the traditional form is one of the most pleasing to the ear in the English language.
a
b
b
a
a
b
b
a
c (or c)
d (or d)
e (or c)
c (or d)
d (or c)
e (or d)
Shakespearean or English Sonnet
This form consists of three heroic quatrains (4 lines), and one rhyming couplet. The three quatrains traditionally presented three aspects of an idea. The final couplet makes explicit the theme of the quatrains.
The rhyme scheme is as follows:
a
b
a
b
c
d
c
d
e
f
e
f
g
g
Haiku
A form from the Japanese, originally the opening section of a renga, a sequential verse form that alternates up to 50 times in 5-7-5 and 7-7- syllable parts written by two or more poets. The "kigo" was the key word or phrase that specified the season of the composition.
The haiku has been westernized to a 5-7-5 syllabication, but the key is to have a total of seventeen syllables.
Ako is a cloud
strewing bits of snow
summer has not been so kind.
--Jan
Sestina
One of the most difficult and complex of the various French forms, the sestina is a poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy. It makes no use of the refrain. This form is usually unrhymed, the effect of rhyme being taken over by a fixed pattern of end-words which demands that these end-words in each stanza be the same, though arranged in a different sequence each time.
If we take 1-2-3-5-6 to represent the end-words of the first stanza, then the first line of the second stanza must end with 6 (the last end-word used in the preceding stanza), the second with 1, the third with 5, the fourth with 2, the fifth with 4, the sixth with 3--and so to the next stanza. The order of the first three stanzas, for instance, would be: 1-2-3-4-5-6; 6-1-5-2-4-3; 3-6-4-1-2-5. The conclusion, or envoy, of three lines must use as end-words 5-3-1, these being the final end-words, in the same sequence, of the sixth stanza. But the poet must exercise even greater ingenuity than all this, since buried in each line of the envoy must appear the other three end-words, 2-6.
Thus so highly artificial a pattern affords a form which, for most poets, can never prove anything more than a poetic exercise. Yet it has been practiced with success in English by Swinburne, Kipling, and Auden.
Sestina
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rains that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
--Elizabeth
Bishop
Terza Rima
A three-line stanza form borrowed from the Italian poets. The rhyme-scheme is aba, bab, cdc, ded, etc. In other words one rhyme-sound is used for the first and third line of each stanza and a new rhyme introduced for the second line, this new rhyme, in turn, being used for the first and third lines of the subsequent stanza. Usually the meter is iambic pentameter. The opening of Shelley's, "Ode to the West Wind," which is written in terza rima, illustrates it:
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, a
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead b
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing a
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red. b
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, c
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed . . . b
The Rondeau and Rondel
The rondeau and the rondel (along with the triolet) belong to a family of poems or songs with recurring lines or half-lines that were much cultivated in Romance languages from the early Middle Ages on. Below are examples of the most common type of rondeau, which has a rhyming pattern of aabba aabR aabbaR, with the first part of the first line ("R") repeated as a refrain at the end of the second two units, giving fifteen lines in all. But other poems have been called "rondeaus," in which the poet simply brings a short poem back around to its beginning, which is repeated. The two examples of the more technically correct rondeau immediately below date from the end of the nineteenth century, when British poets took up elaborate medieval forms. To notate or diagram such poems, see rhyme notation.
What is to Come
WHAT is to come we know not. But we know
That what has been was good--was good to show,
Better to hide, and best of all to bear.
We are the masters of the days that were;
We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered...even so.
Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow?
Life was our friend? Now, if it be our foe--
Dear, though it spoil and break us! --need we care
What is to come?
Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow;
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare
And we can conquer, though we may not share
In the rich quiet of the afterglow
What is to come.
--William
Ernest Henley
Villanelle
Some contemporary formalists think of the villanelle as a Platonic form with eternally fixed lineaments. In fact, poems by that name have taken as many forms as has the sonnet. Thought of by many as a medieval French form, the most commonly accepted definition of the villanelle owes as much to English poets of the late nineteenth century as to anyone else: a nineteen-line poem arranged in five triplets and a concluding quatrain, which repeats the first and third line alternately as a refrain and brings them both back together at the end, and which rhymes aba aba aba aba abaa. Despite its challenge as an intricate form with only two rhyme sounds, the villanelle has appealed to romantic souls such as Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke as well as tinkerers and technicians such as W. H. Auden. It was especially attractive to the "decadent" poets of the late nineteenth century, providing an opportunity for even greater technical elaboration than anything Tennyson used--and also savoring both of the musicality of French Symbolism and pre-Raphaelite medievalism.
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse me, bless me, now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
--Dylan Thomas