Viola Berg, in her book Pathways for the Poet 1977, includes invented forms patterned after some works of American poets.
The Bryant describes observations of nature as metaphor for the social and political world around us. This stanzaic form is patterned after To A Water Foul by American poet, William Cullen Bryant 1794- 1878.
The Bryant is:
• stanzaic, written in any # of quatrains
• metered, L1,L4 trimeter and L2,L3 are pentameter. Short lines are indented.
• rhymed, alternating rhymed quatrains, abab cdcd etc
• a pastoral metaphor
A Water Foul by William Cullen Bryant
Whither, ‘midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?
Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.
Seek’st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,–
The desert and illimitable air,–
Lone wandering, but not lost.
All day thy wings have fann’d
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere:
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.
And soon that toil shall end,
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon o’er thy sheltered nest.
Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.
He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
Pasted from <http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/index.php?showtopic=616>
My thanks to Judi Van Gorder for years of work on this fine PMO resource.
