Tag Archives: ababb

Taylor

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• The Taylor is an invented form, patterned from Upon a Spider Catching a Fly by Edward Taylor (1642-1729) who some call the finest colonial poet although his work was not published until 1939. A puritan poet, his poems are lyrical and yet reflect a staunch Calvinist tone.

The Taylor is:
○ stanzaic, written in any number of cinquains.
○ metric, iambic, L1 trimeter, L2 and L4 dimeter, L3 tetrameter, L5 monometer.
○ rhymed or at least near rhymed ababb cdcdd efeff etc.

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly by Edward Taylor

Thou sorrow, venom elf.
Is this thy play,
To spin a web out of thyself
To catch a fly?
For why?

I saw a pettish wasp
Fall foul therein,
Whom yet thy whorl pins did not clasp
Lest he should fling
His sting.

But as afraid, remote
Didst stand here at
And with thy little fingers stroke
And gently tap
His back.

Thus gently him didst treat
Lest he should pet,
And in a froppish waspish heat
Should greatly fret
Thy net.

Whereas the silly fly,
Caught by its leg,
Thou by the throat took’st hastily
And ‘hind the head
Bite dead.

This goes to pot, that not
Nature doth call.
Strive not above what strength hath got
Lest in the brawl
Thou fall.

This fray seems thus to us:
Hell’s spider gets
His entrails spun to whipcords’ thus,
And wove to nets
And sets,

To tangle Adam’s race
In’s stratagems
To their destructions, spoiled, made base
By venom things,
Damned sins.

But mighty, gracious Lord,
Communicate
Thy grace to break the cord; afford
Us glory’s gate
And state.

We’ll Nightingale sing like,
When perched on high
In glory’s cage, Thy glory, bright,
And thankfully,
For joy.

Pasted from Poetry Magnum Opus, with thanks to Judi Van Gorder for years of work on this fine PMO resource.

My Example

Form: Taylor

Broken Names

I have a friend named Jack,
his brother’s Al.
Their mother wants her old name back
to boost locale
morale.

Since Ackbarr’s now her name
she thinks it’s broken,
perverted by the Islam game
when it’s a token
spoken.

One can’t now yell, “Hi, Jack”
most any where
nor “Allen Ackbarr, glad you’re back!
You been somewhere
by air?”

© Lawrencealot – January 26, 2015

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Lira

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Spanish Poetry
Lira, is a shortened variation of the Canción. The Lira “loosely refers to any short strophe” NPEOPP. The most commonly referred to features of the verse are the repetition of L2 in L5 and a rhyme scheme of aBabB, both of which narrow the verse to a stanzaic form, the quintain. Other frames were also suggested but with less definition. The quintain stanzaic form was apparently the most popular form of the Lira in 16th century Spain. 

The Lira is:
• stanzaic, popularly written in one or a short number of cinquains. The form is occasionally found in sixains and on rare occasions, quatrains.
• syllabic, the lines are usually in a fixed pattern of Italianate lines, (7 and 11 syllables). The last line of the stanza is always 11 syllables. The first stanza establishes the fixed pattern.
• often written with L2 repeated as L5.
• rhymed, often using only consonant rhyme. The most common rhyme scheme is aBabB, but alternatives could be aBaBcC, abbacC, abABcC 

Computer Connection by Judi Van Gorder

Fingertips rapidly tap, 
chosen letters appear in black on the screen.
Words are formed to fill the gap 
between thoughts and sounds unseen.
Chosen letters appear in black on the screen.

Pasted from http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/index.php?showtopic=1016
My thanks to Judi Van Gorder for years of work on this fine PMO resource.

My example

Arrival on Track 3 (Lira)

When she stepped down from the train,
approaching from behind I quickly kissed her.
But, but, but I must explain,
’twasn’t her – ’twas her sister.
Approaching from behind I quickly kissed her.

© Lawrencealot – December 16, 2014

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Cinquain

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(Standard) Cinquain
The cinquain, also known as a quintain or quintet, is a poem or stanza composed of 5 lines. Examples of cinquains can be found in many European languages, and the origin of the form dates back to medieval French poetry.
The most common cinquains in English follow a rhyme scheme of ababb, abaab or abccb. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century poets such as Sir Philip Sidney, George Herbert, Edmund Waller, and John Donne frequently employed the form, creating numerous variations.
Other examples of the form include “To Helen” by Edgar Allen Poe, which begins:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
A Visual Template:
Rhyme optional with Crapsey cinquain
Crapsey cinquain
American poet Adelaide Crapsey invented the modern form,[2] inspired by Japanese haiku and tanka.[3][4] In her 1915 collection titled Verse, published one year after her death, Crapsey included 28 cinquains.[5]
Crapsey’s cinquains utilized an increasing syllable count in the first four lines, namely two in the first, four in the second, six in the third, and eight in the fourth, before returning to two syllables on the last line. In addition, though little emphasized by critics, each line in the majority of Crapsey cinquains has a fixed number of stressed syllables, as well, following the pattern one, two, three, four, one.[citation needed] The most common metrical foot in her twenty-eight published examples is the iamb, though this is not exclusive. Lines generally do not rhyme. In contrast to the Eastern forms upon which she based them, Crapsey always titled her cinquains, effectively utilizing the title as a sixth line.
The form is illustrated by Crapsey’s “November Night”:[6]
Text
Syllables
Stressed
Listen…
2
1
With faint dry sound,
4
2
Like steps of passing ghosts,
6
3
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
8
4
And fall.
2
1
Variations
The Crapsey cinquain has subsequently seen a number of variations by modern poets, including:
Variation
Description
Reverse cinquain
a form with one 5-line stanza in a syllabic pattern of two, eight, six, four, two.
Mirror cinquain
a form with two 5-line stanzas consisting of a cinquain followed by a reverse cinquain.
Butterfly cinquain
a nine-line syllabic form with the pattern two, four, six, eight, two, eight, six, four, two.
Crown cinquain
a sequence of five cinquain stanzas functioning to construct one larger poem.
Garland cinquain
a series of six cinquains in which the last is formed of lines from the preceding five, typically line one from stanza one, line two from stanza two, and so on.
Another form,  Called a Didactic cinquain, sometimes used by school teachers to teach grammar, is as follows:
Line 1: Noun
Line 2: Description of Noun
Line 3: Action
Line 4: Feeling or Effect
Line 5: Synonym of the initial noun