Tag Archives: quatrains

The de Tabley

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• The de Tabley is a verse form patterned after Chorus from Medea by John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley (1835-1895). De Tabley’s poetry reflected his study of the classics and his passion for detail.

The de Tabley is:
○ stanzaic, written in any number of quatrains.
○ metric, alternating iambic pentameter and iambic trimeter lines. L1 of each stanza begins with a trochee
○ rhymed, rhymed scheme abab cdcd etc.
Chorus from Medea by John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley
SWEET are the ways of death to weary feet,
Calm are the shades of men.
The phantom fears no tyrant in his seat,
The slave is master then.
Love is abolish’d; well, that this is so;
We knew him best as Pain.
The gods are all cast out, and let them go!
Who ever found them gain?
Ready to hurt and slow to succour these;
So, while thou breathest, pray.
But in the sepulchre all flesh has peace;
Their hand is put away.
Pasted from <http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/index.php?showtopic=668>
My thanks to Judi Van Gorder for the fine PMO resource.
My example poem
An Old Man’s Dog (The de Tably)
Fate had to play a part in bringing you
looking at pups that day.
Your wife thought it was something fun to do,
and thus you said okay.
Tiny, and still unsteady on my feet,
knowing we had a fit,
I curled up in your hand and felt complete.
How soon you did commit!
Less than a minute passed before we knew
we’d be each other’s pride.
The bond, so evident twixt me and you,
the kennel-master cried.
Never was I an incidental pet
Not just a thing or toy;
We taught each other and we’re learning yet,
thus multiplying joy.
Chewing on shoes is part of puppyhood
and I did spoil one pair.
You said, “Bad dog!” to me, then like you should
hid them from me somewhere.
Bad Dog! became a phrase without a smile
warning me to change my ways.
Those words I haven’t heard now for a while;
I try to earn your praise.
Likely I’ll live until you die my friend.
I’ll miss you every day
and dream of you each night until my end.
I hope it works that way.
Should I become so ill I cannot cope
please take me to the vet.
That in your arms I pass, remains my hope;
just give me one more pet.
© Lawrencealot – June 27, 2014
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The de Tabley

Presidential Meter

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The Presidential Meter form was created by Gary Kent Spain, aka venicebard on Allpoetry.
The form is stanzaic, consisting of any number of quatrains
It is syllabic: 6/5/6/5
Rhyme Scheme: xaxa
It is metric: with long lines being an anapest plus an amphibrach
And the short lines being and anapest and an iamb, or as Gary points out below it can be spoken as trochaic trimeter..So take your choice.
8 lines or more.
His poem in trochaic trimeter:
The Lyre-in-Chief
“If you like your doctor,
if you like your plan,
you can keep your doctor,
you can keep your plan.”
The Liar-in-Chief
War through regulation
waged on you and me.
IRS men target
those who disagree.
Congress is not needed!
for, as he has said,
with his pen and cell-phone,
he becomes the head.
Work that crowd there, baby:
tell them racists lurk.
Tell them those that want to
shouldn’t have to work.
Push those same old buttons,
get that same old drink:
hear-no-evil voters
(lemmings on the brink).
Pasted from <http://allpoetry.com/poem/11504624-The-Lyre-in-Chief-by-venicebard>
Gary’s response to my metric interpretation – So you’re saying I misinterpreted his meter, eh?  You are right, in that the way HE says it, it is an anapest followed by two iambs (with feminine ending on odd-numbered lines).  But it CAN be spoken as trochaic trimeter, and I went with that.  Cheers!
My example using an anapest foot:
The Presidential Way (Presidential Meter)
I will gladly enter
yet another form
that allows remembrance
that a lie’s the norm.
Anapests are starting
each and every line.
Then you use an iamb
where you want the rhyme.
First he won by plying
us with guilt and pride.
From the start however,
the man lied and lied.
© Lawrencealot – June 2, 2014
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Presidential Meter

Sapphic Stanza

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The Sapphic Stanza is classic Aeolic verse and attributed to the poetess Sappho 6 BC, Greece. Plato so admired her that he spoke of her not as lyricist, poet but called her the 10th Muse. Her poems spoke of relationships and were marked by emotion. In a male dominated era she schooled and mentored women artists on the island of Lesbos and her writing has often been equated with woman-love. “Rather than addressing the gods or recounting epic narratives such as those of Homer, Sappho’s verses speak from one individual to another.” NPOPP. 
Sappho’s work has often been referred to as fragments, because only two of her poems have survived in whole with the vast majority of her work surviving in fragments either from neglect, natural disasters, or possible censorship.
Sapphic Stanza is:
  • quantitative verse, measuring long / short vowels. In English we transition to metric measure of stress / unstressed syllables which warps the rhythm a bit but brings it into context the English ear can hear. L= long s = short
  • stanzaic, written in any number of quatrains. This evolved to a quatrain during the Renaissance period from the ancient variable 3 to 4 line stanzas. The quatrain is made up of 3 Sapphic lines followed by an Adonic line which is usually written as a parallel to L3.
    Sapphic line = 11 syllables, trochaic with the central foot being a dactyl
    Adonic line = 5 syllables, a dactyl followed by a trochee
    (see below for more detail on these two components)
  • The modern Sapphic scansion should look like this (Stressed or Long = L; unstressed or short = s )
    Quantitative Verse (L=long syllable * s=short syllable)
    Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-Ls
    Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-Ls
    Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-Ls
    Lss-Ls
    with substituted spondee
    Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-LL
    Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-LL
    Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-LL
    Lss-Ls
  • originally unrhymed, in the Middle Ages the stanza acquired rhyme, rhyme scheme abab. Because of the predominant use of trochee and dactyls the rhyme will generally be feminine or a 2 syllable rhyme with the last syllable unstressed.
  • Adonic line is most often written as a parallel to a previous line. It is the last line of the Sapphic stanza. It is composed in 5 syllables, a dactyl followed by a trochee. It can also be found as a pattern for the refrain in song to honor Adonis, from which it derived its name.
    “death has come near me.”
    last line of     Like the gods
    . . . by Sappho 4th century BC
    edited by     Richmond Lattimore
    Quantitative Verse
    Lss-Ls
    Meaningless prattle. —jvg
  • Sapphic line -Since the Renaissance period the Sapphic line has been recognized as being a 5 foot trochaic line with the central foot being a dactyl. Prior to the Renaissance period this 11 syllable trochaic pattern was known as the “lesser” Sapphic line and the Sapphic line was a combination of the lesser Sapphic line and an adonic line.After Renaissance Sapphic line Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-Ls : Passion, lust, consumed our beginnings fully.
    Prior to Renaissance Sapphic line Ls-Ls-Lss-Ls-Ls,- Lss Ls : greed to love? It happened deceptively, tricking emotions.
    Apparently, the technical terms of “lesser” Sapphic and Sapphic lines have been corrupted over time.
My Thanks to Judi Van Gorder for the wonderful resource at PMO
I am restating the specifications for the 21st century English writing poets, knowing full well that academicians may insist we have corrupted Sappho’s use of long and short vowel sounds.  A real poet might strive to make those sounds and the syllabic accents coincide, then none can argue.
A Sapphic Stanza is:
Stanzaic, consisting of any number of quatrains.
Syllabic, each stanza consisting 3 Sapphic Lines plus a Adonic line.
Metrical.  The Sapphic lines being trochaic with the central foot being a dactyl (11 syllables), and          The Adonic lines being a dactyl followed by a trochee (5 syllables)
Rhymed, the pattern being abab.
Example Poem
Quantitative Verse       (Sapphic Stanza)
Seek out passion, write of the trials that poets
face, with no complaint but with guidance, using
items neither trite nor near dying, so it’s
true and amusing.
© Lawrencealot – April 17, 2014
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In this example I have tried to make each accented syllable also use an English long vowel sound.
Sapphic Stanza

Zejel

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Zejel
The zejel is a Spanish form which my Spanish friends have not heard of. They tell me though that it is pronounced the-hell, with the stress on the second syllable. (How the hell do they know?)
My example in this form is about how men can’t help thinking about sex. I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, and get me a reputation as a male chauvinist pig. As I’m always saying, the opinions expressed in the poem are not necessarily those of the poet himself. (See also my Masefield parody.) 
I checked on the web how many times a day men are reputed to think about sex. The consensus seemed to be that it was about 200. The lowest figure came from the Ladies Home Journal, which said “4 or 5”. The highest came from the film Simply Irresistible, which says 278 – apparently it uses this as a running gag. (One site actually topped this with a claim of “every 8 seconds”, which works out at 450 times an hour, but I think that writer may have been shooting from the hip, as it were.)
Anyway, here’s the poem:
Proposition
Mostly, sex tops men’s agenda.
I’m not one to buck the trend – a
Red-blooded repeat offender.
Hurrying for the morning train,
Spirit not damped by teeming rain,
There’s only one thing on my brain:
All the time I think of gender.
At the office, deep in filing,
Boredom on frustration piling,
Even then, a woman smiling
Makes me feel all warm and tender.
Are you female and eighteen plus?
A good sport and adventurous?
We have a great deal to discuss.
Come back to my hacienda!
The first stanza, known as the mudanza, has three lines, rhyming aaa. All the other stanzas – as many of them as you like – have 4 lines, rhyming bbba, the a rhyme harking back to the first stanza. So the overall rhyming scheme for the poem is aaa/bbba/ccca/ddda/…
Colloquial language tends to be used, and 8-syllable lines are usual (though not obligatory), so that’s what I’ve used here. I have interpreted the term “8-syllable line” to mean “a line with 8 syllables”, and I suggest that you should do the same. However, in Spanish poetry syllable-counting works differently, and the term “8-syllable line” is liable to be interpreted as “a line in which the last stressed syllable is the seventh”; such a line might have 7 syllables, or 8, or 9, or even more. (I wonder whether the Spanish write haiku?
Pasted from <http://volecentral.co.uk/vf/zejel.htm>
Thanks to Bob Newman for his wonderful Volecentral resource site.
Example Poem
Toothless Smile      (Zejel)
The tortoise lived out on a heath
with only sage to hide beneath
his home he never could bequeath.
While I am taxed for my household
and pay and pay until I’m old,
and shall until I’m dead and cold
and I’m ensconced beneath a wreath.
My brilliant smile was once okay,
before my teeth all went away;
my progeny will have to say,
“He kept his house but lost his teeth.”
© Lawrencealot – April 16, 2014
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Deibhidhe

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Deibhidhe
The deibhidhe is an Irish form. In English it is more often spelt deibide, but you still have to pronounce it jayvee. (The Irish language uses a lot of unlikely-looking clusters of consonants, and most of them seem to be either pronounced as “v” or not pronounced at all. Exercise: pronounce the name of the poet Medbh McGuckian.) 
Here’s a deibhidhe about the time I spent working in the oil industry:
No, Watercolour…
Of a subject dire I sing:
Reservoir Engineering
I could never understand –
A queer and quaggy quicksand!
I was sent away to learn
About it in climes northern,
But while at Herriot-Watt
My zeal did not run riot.
All the years I worked in oil,
My conscience was in turmoil.
I floundered through the fog
Like a bogged-down wan warthog.
My colleagues would make a fuss.
Those strata – were they porous?
It bothered me not a whit
How the drill bit grey granite.
The mysteries of the rock
Made me feel like a pillock.
Underground movements of gas
Alas, my mind can’t compass.
I don’t work there any more,
Redundancy my saviour.
Not a tragedy at all –
A small but welcome windfall!
There was a TV advert for an airline some years ago which featured the following exchange between two passengers on a flight to Aberdeen. Large outgoing American: “D’you work in oil?” Weedy-looking bespectacled Brit: “No, watercolour.” Hence the title. Herriot-Watt University is situated near Edinburgh and offers week-long courses on such arcane subjects as Reservoir Engineering, cleverly sugaring the pill by making them coincide with the Edinburgh Festival.
As for the form, each stanza has 4 lines of 7 syllables each, rhyming aabb, and both of these rhymes are deibide rhymes i.e. in the first line of each rhyming pair, the rhyming syllable is stressed, and in the second it is unstressed.
The form also demands an aicill rhyme between lines 3 and 4 i.e. the word at the end of line 3 rhymes with a word somewhere in the middle of line 4 (as whit/bit, gas/alas above). 
Finally, there must be alliteration between the last word of each stanza and the preceding stressed word (as quaggy quicksand, welcome windfall above).
This amounts to a lot of constraints for the fourth line to satisfy in the space of only 7 syllables. I found this form a tough one, except when writing the last stanza. Perhaps I was getting into the swing of it by then.
Thanks to Bob Newman for his wonderful Volecentral resource site.
Specifications restated:
Isosyllabic: 7/7/7/7
Rhymed: aabb
My example poem
Night Nymph     (Deibhidhe)
I was mesmerized, entranced
when she stood in the entrance.
Just one glance at her’d confer
instantly a pure pleasure
The nymph caused my heart to sing
and set my nerves to dancing
I viewed her in near undress
and dreamed she’d be my mistress.
But it was not meant to be,
this maiden oh so pretty.
for she was gone with the sun
a nighttime visit vision.
© Lawrencealot – April 10, 2014
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Ch'I Yen Shih

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Ch’i-Yen-Shih metre
This is, believe it or not, a Chinese verse form. Whether it’s worth doing in English is debatable. Stanzas have four lines of seven syllables each, with lines 2 and 4 rhyming. Each line has a caesura, or break, after the fourth syllable; I have laid the example out to emphasise this. That’s all there is to it, really, except that, to make it sound a little more Chinese, only words of one syllable should be used. 
Fenland
Long straight black road
far from home.
The moon hangs snagged
in the trees.
Foot down, I speed
through the night.
Rain falls in sheets,
starts to freeze.
The cats eyes pulse
like Morse code.
Far sparks speed close,
blaze then fade.
For hours on end
there’s no change:
Road, light, rain, wind,
screen and blade.
I’m tired and cold,
on my own.
How much of this
can I take?
I grit my teeth,
try to guess
How long I’ll last
till I brake.
Thanks to Bob Newman for his wonderful Volecentral resource site
Ancient Verse is probably the same verse form as Ch’I Yen Shih from the Lu Shi code verse. Ancient Verse is found desribed in John Drury’s poe-try-dic-tion-ar-y and is similar to Ch’I Yen Shi, with slight variation. As described by Drury, caesura was not specified and more latitude was given in the character count. This is probably an example of how form evolves or is corrupted by translation. For now I will treat this verse form as separate.
(Drury uses “syllable count”) Technically in Chinese prosody, character count and syllable count are one in the same since Chinese characters are one word and Chinese words are usually one syllable. However in English translation, a character could represent a 2 or 3 syllable English word. I use “character” in most of my metric descriptions of Chinese verse and often count words rather than syllables when attempting to write poems using Chinese verse forms in English. However, since Drury’s book describes the meter for this form as syllabic, I follow his lead.
Ancient Verse is:
  • stanzaic, written in quatrains.
  • syllabic, 5 to 7 syllable lines. isosyllabic (7/7/7/7) or (5/5/5/5)
  • rhymed, rhyme scheme either xaxa xaxa etc or xaxa xbxb etc. ( xaxaxaxa etc or xaxaxbxb)
  • no fixed tone pattern.
  • always composed with parallels and balance.
    pyramid by Judi Van Gorder
  • fresh dug dirt makes space and waits
  • rich earth forms a pyramid
    to welcome polished pine box
    with white roses on the lid
Thanks to Judi Van Gorder for her wonderful PMO resource site.
My example poem
Surveillance       (Ch’I Yen Shih)
My house has eyes in the dark
Big dogs see but first they smell.
I don’t switch them – off or on
still they serve as my door bell.
© Lawrencealot – April 9, 2014
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Violette

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• The Violette is a stanzaic form with a rhyme scheme similar to the Zéjel without the mundanza, introduced by Viola Gardner. Line 4 carries a linking rhyme from stanza to stanza.
The Violette is:
○ stanzaic, written in any number of quatrains.
○ syllabic, 6/6/6/4 syllables per line.
○ rhymed, feminine rhyme used aaab cccb dddb etc b is a linking rhyme from stanza to stanza.
Pasted from http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/index.php?showtopic=1882#baccresiez
My Thanks to Judi Van Gorder for the wonderful resource at PMO
My example poem

Fairy Trails     (Violette)
I followed her that day
to where the fairies play,
I thought ‘twould be okay.
She ran from me.
I touched her; thought I’d earned
that for which I’d so yearned
but with that touch I turned
into a tree.
As seasons’ colors changed
with words and thoughts exchanged
the fairy maid arranged
to set me free.
With nothing more to lose,
each year she brings me clues
and monthly she will choose
to sit with me.
© Lawrencealot – April 7, 2014
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Cromorna

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  • Cromorna is a verse form that has compact lines and exacting meter and rhyme developed by Viola Berg.The Cromorna is:
    • stanzaic, written in 3 quatrains.  
    • syllabic, with  5/3/5/3/5/3/5/3/5/3/5/3 syllables per line.
    • rhymed, rhyme scheme abab cbcb dbdb  ().
My Thanks to Judi Van Gorder for the wonderful resource at PMO
My example Poem
Diverse     (Cromorna)
An electric arc
could have been
the requisite spark
way back when.
And that ignition
led to men
and our condition,
now and then.
If so, I suppose
we must yen
for each one of those
who our ken.
© Lawrencealot – March 18, 2014
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(12 lines)

Awit

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The Awit is a Filipino poetry form explained below by Judi Van Gorder
On her wonderful PMO resource site:
  • Awit literally means song. This stanzaic form seems very similar to the Tanaga. It is unique in that a stanza should be one complete, grammatically correct, sentence.The Awit is:
    • stanzaic, written in any number of quatrains. (4 line multiples)
    • a narrative, it tells a story.
    • dodecasyllabic, 12 syllables per line, there is usually a pause after the 6th syllable.
    • rhymed, each stanza mono-rhymed aaaa bbbb cccc etc.
    • composed with each stanza representing a complete, grammatically correct, sentence.
    • composed liberally using various figures of speech.
    • written anonymously.
My example of a single stanza poem
The Climb     (Awit)
I started up the hills, intending on that day
to climb like deer to plateaus where the rocks gave way
to grasses lush and green, above where wild hawks play,
and ended up on top – above all human fray.
©  March 3, 2014

Classical Hendecasyllable

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Classical Hendecasyllable
Type:
Line, Metrical Requirement
Description:
This is a trochee, a dactyl, and three trochees. The first and last trochees can be spondees.
Origin:
Greek
Schematic:
XX Xxx Xx Xx XX or
Xx Xxx Xx Xx Xx
Line/Poem Length:
11
See Also:
Status:
Incomplete
To contact us, e-mail thegnosticpoet@poetrybase.info.
Copyright © 2001-2013 by Charles L. Weatherford. All rights reserved.
Thanks to Charles for the wonderful resource above, which after investigation is frequently the only one I need.
I found these in quatrains with abab rhyme, and in a single 15 line unrhymed stanza by Robert Frost. “For Once, Then, Something” the only such he ever wrote in this form.
Example Poem
Extinguished          (Classical Hendecasyllable)
Glowing embers ignite when fanned with ardour
left alone they conserve by self-containment.
Love’s lost heat can be flamed by trying harder
Or, ignored and then settled by arraignment.
(c) Lawrencealot – March 2, 2014
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