Trellis Magazine - 2007 Issue
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Sonnet Article
History of the Sonnet Form
by D. Marbach
What is a sonnet? A sonnet was originally a lyric poetry form of 14 lines. Any poem with 14 lines is called a
quatorzain. Although sonnets are almost always quatorzains, not all quatorzains are sonnets. There are several
elements to the sonnet form, and these elements should be present in order for the poem to be a sonnet.
The sonnet originated in Italy. The Italian word “sonneto” means “little song”. The first sonnet is believed to have
been created in the early 13th century by an Italian named Giacomo da Lentini. He was the senior poet of the Sicilian
school. Da Lentini created the sonnet form from a popular type of Sicilian peasant song called a “strambatto”. The
peasant songs consisted of an “octave” (an eight-line stanza*) with the simple alternating rhyme scheme [a-b-a-b-a-b-
a-b]. To the strambatto, he added a “sestet” (a six-line stanza) with the chaining rhyme scheme [c-d-e-c-d-e]. Da
Lentini wrote many sonnets, but only a few have survived, including “Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire.”
One of the elements of a sonnet is its lyrical form, as if the poem were words which could be sung to the music of a
“lyre” (a small harp), because the beginnings of the sonnet were in the folk songs of Italy. The lyrical quality of the
sonnet is seen in its formal rhyme scheme and its mostly uniform number of syllables per line. However, although the
sonnet is a lyrical form, it is not intended to be sung like the strambatto.
Two other elements of a sonnet are its unequal stanzas of rhyming lines, and its turn. The stanzas of the sonnet are
unequal, with larger stanzas coming first and smaller stanzas coming last. The sonnet form should have an uneven
distribution because this allows for the poet to create a “volta” between stanzas. The Italian word “volta” means
“turn”. In Da Lentini’s sonnet form, the octave and sestet arrangement allowed for a turn in the poem between the
octave and the sestet. The turn could be used by the poet in a variety of ways, and the sonnet became very popular
as a creative writing game. The mood, thought, or focus of the sonnet occurred in two parts; the octave stated a
problem, asked a question, or expressed a tension, and the sestet resolved the problem, answered the question, or
relieved the tension. The
sonnet’s uneven distribution could also be used by the poet to incorporate several voices or points of view in the
poem, allowing a dialogue, such as in an “I and you” relationship.
The other common element of most sonnets is a theme of love. The love may be either romantic love for a woman,
Platonic love for a friend, spiritual love for the Deity, patriotic love for country, or love for mankind. In fact, the
word “sonnet” is often used informally to refer to any short romantic love poem.
Later in the 13th century another Italian, Guittone d’Arezzo, the founder of the Tuscan school of court poetry,
introduced the “kissing rhyme” pattern for his sonnet octave. This kissing rhyme pattern is [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a]. D’
Arezzo wrote and circulated over 200 sonnets, but only a few of them have been preserved.
Two popular Italian poets, Dante and Petrarch, took the sonnet form and used it in their writing. They made the
sonnet a well-established form of poetry in the Italian language by the mid 13th century. The pattern for this Italian
sonnet was an octave with the kissing rhyme scheme and a sestet with a chaining rhyme scheme [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a c-d-
e-c-d-e]. The lines usually had eleven syllables (hendecasyllable).
Dante’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life) was the first sonnet sequence ever written, containing 25 sonnets and several
other lyric poems with explanatory prose. A sonnet sequence is a series of sonnets that are organized in some
fictional, intellectual, or chronological order. The sequence may tell a story or develop an argument. Dante’s
sequence discusses his tremendous love for Beatrice.
Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Songs/Poems Collection) is a series of lyrical poems including over 300 sonnets. Petrarch is
considered to have perfected the Italian sonnet, which became known also as the Petrarchan sonnet. Canzoniere
includes many love poems and grief poems about a woman named Laura.
Different Italian poets used the sonnet form, and variations occurred as the sonnet spread over the next couple of
centuries. Poets chose either the alternating rhyme pattern [a-b-a-b] or the kissing rhyme pattern [a-b-b-a] in their
octave. Poets used a variety of sestet rhyme schemes with chaining or alternating variations, such as [c-d-c-c-d-c],
[c-d-e-d-c-e], and [c-d-c-d-c-d]. The theme typically still occurred in two moods; the octave stated a problem, asked
a question, or expressed a tension, and the sestet resolved the problem, answered the question, or relieved the
tension. However, poets also experimented with different divisions of the 14 lines. They divided the octave into
two “quatrains” (stanzas of four lines). They divided the sestet into two “tercets” (stanzas of three lines) or into
three “couplets” (stanzas of two lines). By dividing the poem differently, the poets could add complexity to the
theme.
As the sonnet form spread to other countries in Europe, the lines were adapted by that country’s poets. For
example, in France, the popular meter of French poets was the Alexandrine line (12 syllables), and so the French
sonnets used the Alexandrine line. Also, the French poets emphasized the “volta” between the octave and sestet
by inserting a rhyming couplet [c-c] there. The French sonnet rhyme scheme was often [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a c-c-d-e-d-e].
In the early 16th century Sir Thomas Wyatt, an English poet in King Henry VIII’s court, encountered the sonnet in his
mission trips to Italy. Wyatt carried the idea back to the Tudor court. Wyatt imitated Petrarch with an octave of
kissing rhyme [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a]. He changed the sestet by dividing it into a quatrain of kissing rhyme [c-d-d-c] and a
rhyming couplet (also called a “heroic couplet”) at the end [e-e]. Wyatt also reduced the number of syllables for each
line, using the iambic pentameter** line which was popular in English poetry. About thirty of Wyatt’s sonnets were
preserved in printed form, including “Farewell, Love, and all thy laws for ever.”
A friend of Wyatt’s in the Tudor court adapted the sonnet form further. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, liked to use
alternating rhyme for his sonnets, rather than kissing rhyme. In some of his sonnets he used a different set of rhymes
for the second and third quatrains, so that we see the English sonnet form beginning to emerge as [a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-
f-e-f g-g] in Surrey’s preserved works, including “Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green.”
Why did the English poets start changing the Italian sonnet form? One of the main reasons for changing the rhyme
scheme of the Italian sonnet was that the Italian sonnet used only four or five endings for the rhymes (a b c d) or (a b
c d e). It was difficult for English poets to make a fourteen-line poem with only four or five different rhyming
endings. The Italian language is one of the Romance*** languages, which matches subject and verb as to number and
gender, and matches noun and adjective as to number and gender. The matching is indicated by similar endings on
the words. Italian words are more easily rhymed because they tend to end in the same cluster of syllables. The
English language does not match words so much, and the endings of English words come in a great variety. Compare
the Italian phrase “mama mia” with the English translation “my mother”. It is harder to rhyme things in English.
Surrey gave the fourteen-line English sonnet seven endings for the rhymes (a b c d e f g) because it was easier.
In 1575, the English poet and critic George Gascoigne was the first to define in writing the English sonnet form,
stating a limit of 14 lines, a line length of ten syllables, and the rhyme scheme of three quatrains and a couplet, in his
“Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English.”
The English sonnet is known also as the Shakespearean sonnet because William Shakespeare took the new form and
perfected it in his writings during the late 16th century. Shakespeare is credited with writing 154 sonnets, most of
which were published in 1609. His sonnets used 14 lines of iambic pentameter with rhyme scheme [a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-
f-e-f g-g]. (Although Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in English, they contain archaic words and odd spellings.
Therefore, using a commentary or explanatory guide about Shakespeare’s sonnets can make them easier for the
modern reader to understand.)
The English sonnet feels different than the Italian sonnet. The English sonnet is broken into three quatrains and a
couplet, whereas the Italian sonnet is broken into an octave and a sestet. The English sonnet has no rhyming
couplets until the terminal rhyming couplet, which makes that final couplet seem like a definite end to the poem. In
the octave of a traditional Petrarchan sonnet [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a] there are three rhyming couplets in the kissing rhyme
scheme, but no rhyming couplet at the end of the sestet. The Italian sonnet’s rhymes feel flowing and interlacing,
whereas the English sonnet’s rhymes do not carry over from quatrain to quatrain.
The English poets began experimenting with the sonnet form. Sir Philip Sidney, a statesman for the Elizabethan
court and an English poet, wrote an extraordinary sonnet sequence titled Astrophel and Stella about his hidden love
for another man’s wife. Sidney varied the rhyme schemes from sonnet to sonnet in this long series of over 100
sonnets with many experimental permutations. Sidney’s sonnet sequence, written in the late 16th century, was very
popular and was imitated by many English poets.
The writer Edmund Spenser, a member of the literary circle led by Sir Sidney, adapted the English sonnet into one of
Sidney’s experimental rhyme patterns. Spenser wanted to preserve the Italian sonnet’s flowing nature, its musicality
and emotionality, while still allowing himself the greater ability to rhyme within the sounds of the English language.
He fully developed this flowing form for his sonnets in Amoretti, a beautiful sequence of 88 sonnets dedicated to his
future wife as a marriage gift in 1595. The rhyme scheme, which became known as the Spenserian sonnet, has three
quatrains and a terminal couplet [a-b-a-b b-c-b-c c-d-c-d e-e]. This pattern produces three rhyming couplets,
including the terminal rhyming couplet. The Spenserian sonnet form invokes both the Italian and English model
simultaneously, while also deviating from both previous forms.
Sonnet sequences have been attempted by many poets. However, sonnet sequences are difficult to write and good
ones are rare. A good modern English sequence is Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence of 44 romantic love
sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning during her courtship with her husband, and published in 1850.
One special type of sonnet sequence is the “corona” (which means “crown”). The corona is a sequence of at least
seven sonnets. It includes repeated lines. The last line of the first sonnet is used as the first line of the second
sonnet, and the last line of the second sonnet is used as the first line of the third sonnet, and so on. Then the last
line of the seventh sonnet is the same as the first line of the first sonnet, which makes the sequence come back to
its beginning like a circle. An early corona in the Italian language is the poet Fazio degli Uberti’s sequence on the
seven deadly sins. One of the most famous coronas in English is by John Donne, a leading poet of the Metaphysical
school and the dean of St. Paul’s cathedral in London. Donne’s corona is the prologue of his Holy Sonnets written in
the early 17th century.
The sonnet appeared in America toward the end of the 18th century. It spread rapidly amongst American poets, and
was brought to a high level in the mid 19th century in the works of the popular American poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. Longfellow translated Dante’s Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) into English. Longfellow also wrote
many original sonnets, including six sonnets in the Italian sonnet form about Dante’s Divine Comedy, and sonnets
about other poets such as “Dante” and “Shakespeare.”
You may be familiar with the inscription engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your
poor….I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”). This inscription is the last five lines of the sonnet “The New
Colossus”, written by Emma Lazarus about the new statue. Lazarus was a New Yorker of Portuguese Jewish descent
who fought for the rights of refugees in the 19th century. The inspiring words of her sonnet have encouraged
compassion for immigrants and have given generations of newcomers hope. A lot of love for mankind is packed into
the “little song” of Emma Lazarus.
During the early 20th century, many black American poets of the Harlem Renaissance wrote sonnets. They chose this
form to express their struggle for racial equality. These sonnets transcended their authors’ culture, reaching a wide
audience. For example, when Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons during World War II, he read aloud
the sonnet “If We Must Die.” The sonnet had been written decades earlier by Claude McKay in response to the
Harlem race riots of 1919. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., read this poem into the U.S. Congressional record during
World War II for its inspirational theme. The sonnet brought the Harlem poet’s message to another time and place, to
people in another crisis, still invoking courage and dignity in the face of possible death.
Poets have created many interesting variations of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms over the
centuries. Examples are the heroic sonnet, the caudated sonnet, and the curtal sonnet. These special sonnet forms
still have the elements of a sonnet: lyrical pattern, stanzas with different weights, a turn, and a theme usually of
love.
The heroic sonnet is an 18-line sonnet which is a variant of the English sonnet. It can be made by adding a fourth
quatrain before the terminal couplet [a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-f-e-f g-h-g-h i-i]. Or, it can be formed by having two
“heroic octaves” [a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c] and a terminal couplet. An example of a heroic sonnet is John Donne’s sonnet
“The Token.”
The caudated sonnet (caudated means “having a tail”) has more than fourteen lines because it has extra lines added
at the end like a tail. John Milton is probably the most famous poet who used the caudated sonnet in English, basing
it on a 15th century Italian Renaissance pattern. Milton was the secretary for foreign languages in the Cromwell
government of England in the mid 17th century. He used the Petrarchan sonnet form for the first fourteen lines and
added one or two tails for some of his political poems. The tail is a tercet of three lines. The first line of the tail
rhymes with the last line of the sestet, and the other two lines of the tail are a rhyming couplet. The lines of the tails
of caudated sonnets are sometimes half-lines. In one example, the rhyme scheme for Milton’s caudated sonnet “On
the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament” is [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a c-d-e-d-e-c c-f-f f-g-g]. Gerard
Manley Hopkins also wrote some interesting caudated sonnets, including “Tom’s Garland.”
The curtal sonnet (curtal means “shortened) was a sonnet form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest
and one of the most creative English poets of the late 19th century. Hopkins wrote many inventive Petrarchan
sonnets. He often used accented syllables in the lines of his sonnets, as part of his invented “sprung rhythm” meter
for his lines. For example, accents indicate his two different choices for the stressed syllable in the word
“sometimes” in a stanza of his sonnet “The Caged Skylark”:
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Hopkins’ curtal sonnet form is like a condensed sonnet. It has only ten and a half lines, which are divided as two
unequal stanzas of six and four-and-a-half. The rhyme pattern for his curtal sonnet “Peace” is [a-b-c-a-b-c d-c-b-d-
c].
Modern poets of the 20th and 21st centuries have used the sonnet to address any subject and mood, and have
loosened the restrictions on meter and rhyme. Sometimes they take liberties with the sonnet form, and sometimes
they adhere to it very strictly. Robert Frost, an American poet, often used the Italian and English forms strictly in
many sonnets about farm life in New England. Frost also would play with the sonnet form to suit his purposes.
Edward Estlin Cummings, the American poet known as e.e. cummings, used his Yankee wit and childlike
punctuation/capitalization style in sonnets. Cummings followed the traditional Italian and English sonnet forms, but
sometimes he experimented with surprising twists. Cummings experimented with all of these in his sonnets: stanzas
or words grouped oddly, meter shortened to 8 syllables, a more intricate rhyme scheme, looser rhymes, an added
line. His sonnets are often about romantic love, including the popular “i carry your heart with me.”
The sonnet is one of the oldest literary forms of the postclassical world, engaging almost every important poet writing
in a European or English language. It is still used by contemporary poets, who enjoy the game of playing within the
bounded space of 14 lines. May you be inspired to join the centuries of poets in using the sonnet form to express
your important message!
*stanza: a unit of recurring meter and rhyme used in a pattern of repetition and separation within a poem. The
Italian word “stanza” means “a room”. A stanza is made up of two or more lines of poetry. The stanza within a poem
is like a room within a house; it is a smaller part of the overall architecture.
**iambic pentameter: a type of meter used in English poetry which has ten syllables with five rising stresses in the
line. The Greek word “meter” means “measure”. Most lines of poetry in English have an accentual-syllabic meter,
which means that both the syllables and their accents are counted or measured. The line is made up of a specific
number of syllables with a specific pattern of accents, or stressed syllables. “Iambos” is a word used by ancient Greek
poets to indicate a metrical unit. In English, the metrical unit is usually called a “foot”. The iambic unit is a metrical
unit or foot consisting of an unstressed or short syllable followed by a stressed (or accented) or long syllable. An
example of an iambic unit would be the English word “about”. “Penta” is the Greek word for “five”. So, putting it all
together, iambic pentameter is a line of five iambic feet. An example of a line of iambic pentameter in poetry is
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. It is believed that most poetry is iambic
because spoken language is inherently iambic, consisting of words with stressed and unstressed syllables that can
alternate in everyday sentences. For example, you have created a line of iambic pentameter by saying, “I’ll have a
sandwich and some lemonade.”
***Romance languages: the group of European languages derived from spoken Latin. Latin was the language of the
Roman conquerors of Europe during the Roman Empire. The most important Romance languages are Italian, French,
Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. These languages share a common vocabulary and grammar heritage from ancient
Rome.
References
Levin, Phillis, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. New York: Penguin Books,
2001.
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, eds. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2000.
“Frost, Robert (Lee).” The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, ed. Ian Ousby. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
“Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Ibid.
Preminger, Alex; Scott, Clive; and Brogan, T.V.F., “Alexandrine.” The New Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, eds. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Rivers, Elias L.; and Brogan, T.V.F., “Corona.” Ibid.
Brogan, T.V.F., “Iambic.” Ibid.
Brogan, T.V.F.; Zillman, Lawrence J.; and Scott, Clive, “Sonnet.” Ibid.
Greene, Roland, “Sonnet Sequence.” Ibid.
Scott, Clive; and Brogan, T.V.F., “Sprung Rhythm.” Ibid.
“cummings, e.e.” Vol. 3, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition. Chicago: Encylopaedia Brittanica Inc., 1985.
“Dante.” Vol. 3, Ibid.
Milgate, Wesley, “Donne, John.” Vol. 4, Ibid.
“Giacomo Da Lentini.” Vol. 5, Ibid.
“Guittone D’Arezzo.” Vol. 5, Ibid.
Reid, John Cowie, “Hopkins, Gerard Manley.” Vol. 6, Ibid.
“Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth.” Vol. 7, Ibid.
“Milton, John.” Vol. 8, Ibid.
Whitfield, John Humphreys, “Petrarch.” Vol. 9, Ibid.
“Romance languages.” Vol. 10, Ibid.
Ringler Jr., William Andrew, “Sidney, Sir Philip.” Vol. 10, Ibid.
“Sonnet.” Vol. 11, Ibid.
Hieatt, A. Kent, “Spenser, Edmund.” Vol. 11, Ibid.
History of the Sonnet Form
by D. Marbach
What is a sonnet? A sonnet was originally a lyric poetry form of 14 lines. Any poem with 14 lines is called a
quatorzain. Although sonnets are almost always quatorzains, not all quatorzains are sonnets. There are several
elements to the sonnet form, and these elements should be present in order for the poem to be a sonnet.
The sonnet originated in Italy. The Italian word “sonneto” means “little song”. The first sonnet is believed to have
been created in the early 13th century by an Italian named Giacomo da Lentini. He was the senior poet of the Sicilian
school. Da Lentini created the sonnet form from a popular type of Sicilian peasant song called a “strambatto”. The
peasant songs consisted of an “octave” (an eight-line stanza*) with the simple alternating rhyme scheme [a-b-a-b-a-b-
a-b]. To the strambatto, he added a “sestet” (a six-line stanza) with the chaining rhyme scheme [c-d-e-c-d-e]. Da
Lentini wrote many sonnets, but only a few have survived, including “Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire.”
One of the elements of a sonnet is its lyrical form, as if the poem were words which could be sung to the music of a
“lyre” (a small harp), because the beginnings of the sonnet were in the folk songs of Italy. The lyrical quality of the
sonnet is seen in its formal rhyme scheme and its mostly uniform number of syllables per line. However, although the
sonnet is a lyrical form, it is not intended to be sung like the strambatto.
Two other elements of a sonnet are its unequal stanzas of rhyming lines, and its turn. The stanzas of the sonnet are
unequal, with larger stanzas coming first and smaller stanzas coming last. The sonnet form should have an uneven
distribution because this allows for the poet to create a “volta” between stanzas. The Italian word “volta” means
“turn”. In Da Lentini’s sonnet form, the octave and sestet arrangement allowed for a turn in the poem between the
octave and the sestet. The turn could be used by the poet in a variety of ways, and the sonnet became very popular
as a creative writing game. The mood, thought, or focus of the sonnet occurred in two parts; the octave stated a
problem, asked a question, or expressed a tension, and the sestet resolved the problem, answered the question, or
relieved the tension. The
sonnet’s uneven distribution could also be used by the poet to incorporate several voices or points of view in the
poem, allowing a dialogue, such as in an “I and you” relationship.
The other common element of most sonnets is a theme of love. The love may be either romantic love for a woman,
Platonic love for a friend, spiritual love for the Deity, patriotic love for country, or love for mankind. In fact, the
word “sonnet” is often used informally to refer to any short romantic love poem.
Later in the 13th century another Italian, Guittone d’Arezzo, the founder of the Tuscan school of court poetry,
introduced the “kissing rhyme” pattern for his sonnet octave. This kissing rhyme pattern is [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a]. D’
Arezzo wrote and circulated over 200 sonnets, but only a few of them have been preserved.
Two popular Italian poets, Dante and Petrarch, took the sonnet form and used it in their writing. They made the
sonnet a well-established form of poetry in the Italian language by the mid 13th century. The pattern for this Italian
sonnet was an octave with the kissing rhyme scheme and a sestet with a chaining rhyme scheme [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a c-d-
e-c-d-e]. The lines usually had eleven syllables (hendecasyllable).
Dante’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life) was the first sonnet sequence ever written, containing 25 sonnets and several
other lyric poems with explanatory prose. A sonnet sequence is a series of sonnets that are organized in some
fictional, intellectual, or chronological order. The sequence may tell a story or develop an argument. Dante’s
sequence discusses his tremendous love for Beatrice.
Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Songs/Poems Collection) is a series of lyrical poems including over 300 sonnets. Petrarch is
considered to have perfected the Italian sonnet, which became known also as the Petrarchan sonnet. Canzoniere
includes many love poems and grief poems about a woman named Laura.
Different Italian poets used the sonnet form, and variations occurred as the sonnet spread over the next couple of
centuries. Poets chose either the alternating rhyme pattern [a-b-a-b] or the kissing rhyme pattern [a-b-b-a] in their
octave. Poets used a variety of sestet rhyme schemes with chaining or alternating variations, such as [c-d-c-c-d-c],
[c-d-e-d-c-e], and [c-d-c-d-c-d]. The theme typically still occurred in two moods; the octave stated a problem, asked
a question, or expressed a tension, and the sestet resolved the problem, answered the question, or relieved the
tension. However, poets also experimented with different divisions of the 14 lines. They divided the octave into
two “quatrains” (stanzas of four lines). They divided the sestet into two “tercets” (stanzas of three lines) or into
three “couplets” (stanzas of two lines). By dividing the poem differently, the poets could add complexity to the
theme.
As the sonnet form spread to other countries in Europe, the lines were adapted by that country’s poets. For
example, in France, the popular meter of French poets was the Alexandrine line (12 syllables), and so the French
sonnets used the Alexandrine line. Also, the French poets emphasized the “volta” between the octave and sestet
by inserting a rhyming couplet [c-c] there. The French sonnet rhyme scheme was often [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a c-c-d-e-d-e].
In the early 16th century Sir Thomas Wyatt, an English poet in King Henry VIII’s court, encountered the sonnet in his
mission trips to Italy. Wyatt carried the idea back to the Tudor court. Wyatt imitated Petrarch with an octave of
kissing rhyme [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a]. He changed the sestet by dividing it into a quatrain of kissing rhyme [c-d-d-c] and a
rhyming couplet (also called a “heroic couplet”) at the end [e-e]. Wyatt also reduced the number of syllables for each
line, using the iambic pentameter** line which was popular in English poetry. About thirty of Wyatt’s sonnets were
preserved in printed form, including “Farewell, Love, and all thy laws for ever.”
A friend of Wyatt’s in the Tudor court adapted the sonnet form further. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, liked to use
alternating rhyme for his sonnets, rather than kissing rhyme. In some of his sonnets he used a different set of rhymes
for the second and third quatrains, so that we see the English sonnet form beginning to emerge as [a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-
f-e-f g-g] in Surrey’s preserved works, including “Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green.”
Why did the English poets start changing the Italian sonnet form? One of the main reasons for changing the rhyme
scheme of the Italian sonnet was that the Italian sonnet used only four or five endings for the rhymes (a b c d) or (a b
c d e). It was difficult for English poets to make a fourteen-line poem with only four or five different rhyming
endings. The Italian language is one of the Romance*** languages, which matches subject and verb as to number and
gender, and matches noun and adjective as to number and gender. The matching is indicated by similar endings on
the words. Italian words are more easily rhymed because they tend to end in the same cluster of syllables. The
English language does not match words so much, and the endings of English words come in a great variety. Compare
the Italian phrase “mama mia” with the English translation “my mother”. It is harder to rhyme things in English.
Surrey gave the fourteen-line English sonnet seven endings for the rhymes (a b c d e f g) because it was easier.
In 1575, the English poet and critic George Gascoigne was the first to define in writing the English sonnet form,
stating a limit of 14 lines, a line length of ten syllables, and the rhyme scheme of three quatrains and a couplet, in his
“Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English.”
The English sonnet is known also as the Shakespearean sonnet because William Shakespeare took the new form and
perfected it in his writings during the late 16th century. Shakespeare is credited with writing 154 sonnets, most of
which were published in 1609. His sonnets used 14 lines of iambic pentameter with rhyme scheme [a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-
f-e-f g-g]. (Although Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in English, they contain archaic words and odd spellings.
Therefore, using a commentary or explanatory guide about Shakespeare’s sonnets can make them easier for the
modern reader to understand.)
The English sonnet feels different than the Italian sonnet. The English sonnet is broken into three quatrains and a
couplet, whereas the Italian sonnet is broken into an octave and a sestet. The English sonnet has no rhyming
couplets until the terminal rhyming couplet, which makes that final couplet seem like a definite end to the poem. In
the octave of a traditional Petrarchan sonnet [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a] there are three rhyming couplets in the kissing rhyme
scheme, but no rhyming couplet at the end of the sestet. The Italian sonnet’s rhymes feel flowing and interlacing,
whereas the English sonnet’s rhymes do not carry over from quatrain to quatrain.
The English poets began experimenting with the sonnet form. Sir Philip Sidney, a statesman for the Elizabethan
court and an English poet, wrote an extraordinary sonnet sequence titled Astrophel and Stella about his hidden love
for another man’s wife. Sidney varied the rhyme schemes from sonnet to sonnet in this long series of over 100
sonnets with many experimental permutations. Sidney’s sonnet sequence, written in the late 16th century, was very
popular and was imitated by many English poets.
The writer Edmund Spenser, a member of the literary circle led by Sir Sidney, adapted the English sonnet into one of
Sidney’s experimental rhyme patterns. Spenser wanted to preserve the Italian sonnet’s flowing nature, its musicality
and emotionality, while still allowing himself the greater ability to rhyme within the sounds of the English language.
He fully developed this flowing form for his sonnets in Amoretti, a beautiful sequence of 88 sonnets dedicated to his
future wife as a marriage gift in 1595. The rhyme scheme, which became known as the Spenserian sonnet, has three
quatrains and a terminal couplet [a-b-a-b b-c-b-c c-d-c-d e-e]. This pattern produces three rhyming couplets,
including the terminal rhyming couplet. The Spenserian sonnet form invokes both the Italian and English model
simultaneously, while also deviating from both previous forms.
Sonnet sequences have been attempted by many poets. However, sonnet sequences are difficult to write and good
ones are rare. A good modern English sequence is Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence of 44 romantic love
sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning during her courtship with her husband, and published in 1850.
One special type of sonnet sequence is the “corona” (which means “crown”). The corona is a sequence of at least
seven sonnets. It includes repeated lines. The last line of the first sonnet is used as the first line of the second
sonnet, and the last line of the second sonnet is used as the first line of the third sonnet, and so on. Then the last
line of the seventh sonnet is the same as the first line of the first sonnet, which makes the sequence come back to
its beginning like a circle. An early corona in the Italian language is the poet Fazio degli Uberti’s sequence on the
seven deadly sins. One of the most famous coronas in English is by John Donne, a leading poet of the Metaphysical
school and the dean of St. Paul’s cathedral in London. Donne’s corona is the prologue of his Holy Sonnets written in
the early 17th century.
The sonnet appeared in America toward the end of the 18th century. It spread rapidly amongst American poets, and
was brought to a high level in the mid 19th century in the works of the popular American poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. Longfellow translated Dante’s Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) into English. Longfellow also wrote
many original sonnets, including six sonnets in the Italian sonnet form about Dante’s Divine Comedy, and sonnets
about other poets such as “Dante” and “Shakespeare.”
You may be familiar with the inscription engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your
poor….I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”). This inscription is the last five lines of the sonnet “The New
Colossus”, written by Emma Lazarus about the new statue. Lazarus was a New Yorker of Portuguese Jewish descent
who fought for the rights of refugees in the 19th century. The inspiring words of her sonnet have encouraged
compassion for immigrants and have given generations of newcomers hope. A lot of love for mankind is packed into
the “little song” of Emma Lazarus.
During the early 20th century, many black American poets of the Harlem Renaissance wrote sonnets. They chose this
form to express their struggle for racial equality. These sonnets transcended their authors’ culture, reaching a wide
audience. For example, when Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons during World War II, he read aloud
the sonnet “If We Must Die.” The sonnet had been written decades earlier by Claude McKay in response to the
Harlem race riots of 1919. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., read this poem into the U.S. Congressional record during
World War II for its inspirational theme. The sonnet brought the Harlem poet’s message to another time and place, to
people in another crisis, still invoking courage and dignity in the face of possible death.
Poets have created many interesting variations of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms over the
centuries. Examples are the heroic sonnet, the caudated sonnet, and the curtal sonnet. These special sonnet forms
still have the elements of a sonnet: lyrical pattern, stanzas with different weights, a turn, and a theme usually of
love.
The heroic sonnet is an 18-line sonnet which is a variant of the English sonnet. It can be made by adding a fourth
quatrain before the terminal couplet [a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-f-e-f g-h-g-h i-i]. Or, it can be formed by having two
“heroic octaves” [a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c] and a terminal couplet. An example of a heroic sonnet is John Donne’s sonnet
“The Token.”
The caudated sonnet (caudated means “having a tail”) has more than fourteen lines because it has extra lines added
at the end like a tail. John Milton is probably the most famous poet who used the caudated sonnet in English, basing
it on a 15th century Italian Renaissance pattern. Milton was the secretary for foreign languages in the Cromwell
government of England in the mid 17th century. He used the Petrarchan sonnet form for the first fourteen lines and
added one or two tails for some of his political poems. The tail is a tercet of three lines. The first line of the tail
rhymes with the last line of the sestet, and the other two lines of the tail are a rhyming couplet. The lines of the tails
of caudated sonnets are sometimes half-lines. In one example, the rhyme scheme for Milton’s caudated sonnet “On
the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament” is [a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a c-d-e-d-e-c c-f-f f-g-g]. Gerard
Manley Hopkins also wrote some interesting caudated sonnets, including “Tom’s Garland.”
The curtal sonnet (curtal means “shortened) was a sonnet form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest
and one of the most creative English poets of the late 19th century. Hopkins wrote many inventive Petrarchan
sonnets. He often used accented syllables in the lines of his sonnets, as part of his invented “sprung rhythm” meter
for his lines. For example, accents indicate his two different choices for the stressed syllable in the word
“sometimes” in a stanza of his sonnet “The Caged Skylark”:
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Hopkins’ curtal sonnet form is like a condensed sonnet. It has only ten and a half lines, which are divided as two
unequal stanzas of six and four-and-a-half. The rhyme pattern for his curtal sonnet “Peace” is [a-b-c-a-b-c d-c-b-d-
c].
Modern poets of the 20th and 21st centuries have used the sonnet to address any subject and mood, and have
loosened the restrictions on meter and rhyme. Sometimes they take liberties with the sonnet form, and sometimes
they adhere to it very strictly. Robert Frost, an American poet, often used the Italian and English forms strictly in
many sonnets about farm life in New England. Frost also would play with the sonnet form to suit his purposes.
Edward Estlin Cummings, the American poet known as e.e. cummings, used his Yankee wit and childlike
punctuation/capitalization style in sonnets. Cummings followed the traditional Italian and English sonnet forms, but
sometimes he experimented with surprising twists. Cummings experimented with all of these in his sonnets: stanzas
or words grouped oddly, meter shortened to 8 syllables, a more intricate rhyme scheme, looser rhymes, an added
line. His sonnets are often about romantic love, including the popular “i carry your heart with me.”
The sonnet is one of the oldest literary forms of the postclassical world, engaging almost every important poet writing
in a European or English language. It is still used by contemporary poets, who enjoy the game of playing within the
bounded space of 14 lines. May you be inspired to join the centuries of poets in using the sonnet form to express
your important message!
*stanza: a unit of recurring meter and rhyme used in a pattern of repetition and separation within a poem. The
Italian word “stanza” means “a room”. A stanza is made up of two or more lines of poetry. The stanza within a poem
is like a room within a house; it is a smaller part of the overall architecture.
**iambic pentameter: a type of meter used in English poetry which has ten syllables with five rising stresses in the
line. The Greek word “meter” means “measure”. Most lines of poetry in English have an accentual-syllabic meter,
which means that both the syllables and their accents are counted or measured. The line is made up of a specific
number of syllables with a specific pattern of accents, or stressed syllables. “Iambos” is a word used by ancient Greek
poets to indicate a metrical unit. In English, the metrical unit is usually called a “foot”. The iambic unit is a metrical
unit or foot consisting of an unstressed or short syllable followed by a stressed (or accented) or long syllable. An
example of an iambic unit would be the English word “about”. “Penta” is the Greek word for “five”. So, putting it all
together, iambic pentameter is a line of five iambic feet. An example of a line of iambic pentameter in poetry is
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. It is believed that most poetry is iambic
because spoken language is inherently iambic, consisting of words with stressed and unstressed syllables that can
alternate in everyday sentences. For example, you have created a line of iambic pentameter by saying, “I’ll have a
sandwich and some lemonade.”
***Romance languages: the group of European languages derived from spoken Latin. Latin was the language of the
Roman conquerors of Europe during the Roman Empire. The most important Romance languages are Italian, French,
Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. These languages share a common vocabulary and grammar heritage from ancient
Rome.
References
Levin, Phillis, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. New York: Penguin Books,
2001.
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, eds. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2000.
“Frost, Robert (Lee).” The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, ed. Ian Ousby. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
“Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Ibid.
Preminger, Alex; Scott, Clive; and Brogan, T.V.F., “Alexandrine.” The New Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, eds. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Rivers, Elias L.; and Brogan, T.V.F., “Corona.” Ibid.
Brogan, T.V.F., “Iambic.” Ibid.
Brogan, T.V.F.; Zillman, Lawrence J.; and Scott, Clive, “Sonnet.” Ibid.
Greene, Roland, “Sonnet Sequence.” Ibid.
Scott, Clive; and Brogan, T.V.F., “Sprung Rhythm.” Ibid.
“cummings, e.e.” Vol. 3, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition. Chicago: Encylopaedia Brittanica Inc., 1985.
“Dante.” Vol. 3, Ibid.
Milgate, Wesley, “Donne, John.” Vol. 4, Ibid.
“Giacomo Da Lentini.” Vol. 5, Ibid.
“Guittone D’Arezzo.” Vol. 5, Ibid.
Reid, John Cowie, “Hopkins, Gerard Manley.” Vol. 6, Ibid.
“Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth.” Vol. 7, Ibid.
“Milton, John.” Vol. 8, Ibid.
Whitfield, John Humphreys, “Petrarch.” Vol. 9, Ibid.
“Romance languages.” Vol. 10, Ibid.
Ringler Jr., William Andrew, “Sidney, Sir Philip.” Vol. 10, Ibid.
“Sonnet.” Vol. 11, Ibid.
Hieatt, A. Kent, “Spenser, Edmund.” Vol. 11, Ibid.
Humor in Poetic Form
by D. Marbach
How do you write a funny poem? The masters of humorous poetry make it look simple. Their witty poems are natural and playful. You
might think that Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham in a moment of inspiration. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters make playing
basketball look easy, so Dr. Seuss makes writing humorous poetry look easy. However, if you have ever tried to write a funny poem,
you have discovered that it isn’t easy at all. The Harlem Globetrotters practiced their spinning, throwing, bouncing, and other
techniques for a long time to become comic masters with that ball. Dr. Seuss took a year to write The Cat in the Hat, with careful
attention to detail, and many revisions of the exact wording of his humorous verse.
There is no defined genre in English literature for funny poems. Literary scholars have not put effort into studying humorous poetry as
an art. They lump all the funny poems into the vague category “light verse” and view them as undeserving of serious consideration.
But A.A. Milne said light verse “is the supreme exhibition of somebody’s definition of art, the concealment of art. In the result it
observes the most exact laws of rhythm and metre as if by a happy accident, and in a sort of nonchalant spirit of mockery at the real
poets who do it on purpose.” The best writers of light verse are masters of poetic form.
Some of the witty poets wrote a lot of light verse and are famous for it. These include writers like Edward Lear, Arthur Guiterman,
Harry Graham, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash. Such witty poets are known for their inventive humorous poetic styles and devices.
Other witty poets were better known for their serious poetry, or for their prose writings, but they also wrote light verse. This
includes a large number of writers, such as Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc, A. A. Milne, and T. S. Eliot. Even Shakespeare,
who wrote so eloquently about romantic love in his famous sonnets, used his poetic skill to mock love in lesser-known light verses.
Writing humorous poetry is technical work. It is akin to juggling a tower of spinning plates without dropping any of them, until just the
right moment when the tower seems to crumble unexpectedly and the juggler catches every plate, to the surprise and delight of the
audience. The writer uses rhyme, rhythm, and refrain to tickle the reader’s funny bone in a variety of poetic forms intended for
humor. Let’s study some of the techniques used in writing humorous poetry, starting with the elements of rhyme, rhythm, and refrain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
RHYME: Rhyme is an important tool for creating light verse in the English language. Almost all the humorous poems ever written in
English have a pattern of end-rhymes. Rhyme delights the reader’s ear, and it makes the poem simpler for the reader to understand.
A fault of end-rhyme can endanger the structure of a funny poem with its awkwardness. When constructing end-rhymes in a
humorous poem, it is best to use the most exact rhymes possible. The vowel sound and consonant sound in the last syllable of the last
word of each of the two lines should rhyme perfectly to the ear, such as talk/walk, talk/hawk, or talk/cornstalk. A dictionary can be
consulted for pronunciation of end-words, and a rhyming dictionary can be used to find rhyming words.
Funny poems often include further playfulness with rhyme, such as internal rhyme and multi-syllable rhymes. Internal rhyme can be a
little surprise for your reader, by adding a word within a line that rhymes with the word at the end of that line. W. H. Auden used this
fun device (most/post) in stanzas of “Foxtrot” (excerpt):
The blackbird loves the earthworm,
The adder loves the sun,
The polar bear an iceberg,
The elephant a bun,
The trout enjoys the river,
The whale enjoys the sea,
And dogs love most an old lamp-post,
But you’re my cup of tea.
Multi-syllable rhymes can be created in several ways. For creating two-syllable rhymes, poets can use two-syllable words
(thinning/winning), or longer words (fated/liberated), or two separate words acting together (beseech him/impeach him). A multi-
syllable rhyme can be composed by a combination of a long word in a line and two or more short words in the other line, called a
“mosaic rhyme” (installment/Paul meant). The accented syllable in the rhyming sequence should match in both lines. An exact rhyme
is surrender with pretender, which both have the accent on the next-to-last syllable of the line. In contrast, for the two-syllable
rhyme “enic”, arsenic would not be an exact rhyme with hygienic because the accented syllable does not fall in the same place
within the last two syllables of each word.
Many masters of light verse use an occasional “triple rhyme” of three syllables to amuse the reader, emphasize a theme, or create a
punch line. The triple rhyme can consist of two long words, (posterity/rarity), or it can be a mosaic rhyme (posterity/spare it he).
The accented syllables of the triple rhyme should match, so as to make the rhyme sequence sound polished to the ear. Byron
employed many triple rhymes in his humorous poetry, such as this excerpt from “Dedication” in Don Juan:
Bob Southey! You're a poet--Poet-laureate,
And representative of all the race;
Although 'tis true that you turn'd out a Tory at
Last--yours has lately been a common case;
And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
Humorous poems may include the device of “broken rhyme” for an end-rhyme. Broken rhyme is the division of a word at the end of a
line by hyphenating it, in order to produce a rhyme sound with the end of the next line. An example is this excerpt from Edward Lear’
s self-portrait poem which begins “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear”:
When he walks in his waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, ‘He’s run out in his night-
gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!
Broken rhymes are playful and they help to link lines together as the poem flows along. They can be used to surprise the reader with
“what comes next” in the lines.
Another type of humorous rhyme that poets use is the forced rhyme. In the sequence of a forced rhyme combination, a first end-word
is used which then forces the reader to pronounce and accent the next rhyming end-word in a particular way in order to match the
first one. There are several reasons for using a forced rhyme.
Forced rhyme can be used for a sense of closure at the end of a line, or to give prominence to a particular word. An example is
Hilaire Belloc’s poem “Lord Finchley”, which forces an unnaturally long secondary accent onto the last syllable of the last word:
Lord Finchley tried to mend the electric light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
A forced rhyme can be used to help the reader with pronouncing an unusual word, an invented word, or a nonsense word at the end
of a line. Unusual words are used in humorous poetry, but how will your reader know how to say these words? The forced rhyme is a
helpful tool to make the unusual word easier for the reader to pronounce in the way the poet intends. An example is Mark Twain’s
limerick “A Man Hired by John Smith and Co.”, which mocks the use of the abbreviation “Co.” for the word “Company” with Twain’s
two invented abbreviations. (Read this poem slowly and aloud for best effect, remembering the word “company” is the rhyme to
match.)
A man hired by John Smith and Co.
Loudly declared he would tho.
Man that he saw
Dumping dirt near his store.
The drivers, therefore, didn’t do.
Lastly, the forced rhyme can be used in poems where the poet has declined to write the ending to a line because it is not G-rated
(sex, violence, language). Sometimes it is funnier to let the reader “fill in the blank” with a forced rhyme than to state the actual
words. An example is this excerpt of rhyming couplets from Lewis Carroll’s “‘Tis the Voice of the Lobster”:
I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by -------.
Another example is this printer’s humor from the Boston Globe newspaper “An Arab and His Donkey”, using the asterisk symbol to
represent three deleted words that rhyme with “isk” and sound like “asterisk”:
An Arab came to the river side,
With a donkey bearing an obelisk;
But he would not try to ford the tide,
For he had too good an * .
RHYTHM: In comedy, timing is everything. The poetic element of rhythm is often used in witty verse. Writers can skillfully and
purposefully use rhythm to propel the reader along in a fast gallop, to slow down the reader for a longer look, or to surprise the
reader with something sudden and unexpected at the end of the ride.
Rhythm in light verse can be measured out using either of two types of meter. The simpler type of meter is “accentual meter”. The
more exact meter is “accentual-syllabic meter”. The first line of the poem is most important in setting the rhythm for your reader, so
it should be written carefully in the meter you choose.
Accentual meter is a counting of the strongly-stressed syllables, or “beats”, in each line of the poem. Good accentual meter is like
the beat of a drum or the clapping of hands. It is natural and light-hearted. Weaker syllables before, between, and after the beat
syllables are not counted. The beats are strongly spoken, and they are evenly spaced in time. Most accentual meter has four beats
per line. The weaker syllables are spoken during the time between the beats. There may be brief pauses in the middle of the line or
at the end of the line, and a strong beat might fall on an unspoken pause.
Nursery rhymes and ballads are written in accentual meter. A common pattern for an English nursery rhyme is four spoken beats in
the first line, and three spoken beats in the second line. The second line has a fourth unspoken beat at the end in a pause. Here is
the nursery rhyme “Little Jack Horner” with the beats underlined:
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating a Christmas pie.
He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum,
And said “What a good boy am I !”
Another nursery rhyme with the same accentual meter is “Little Miss Muffet”. If one person chants aloud Jack’s poem, and another
person chants aloud Muffet’s poem, starting at the same time and clapping the four beats per line together, they will not be speaking
the same words but they will end their poems at the same time. (Remember, there is a fourth beat on the unspoken pause at the end
of line 2 and line 4).
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider and sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away!
Although the weaker syllables are not counted in accentual meter, it is important not to tangle the reader’s tongue. The reader can
only squeeze about three weak syllables between beats. The more weak syllables there are in a line of accentual meter, the faster
the line will feel.
To write a line of accentual meter, words are chosen so that the beat will fall on naturally-strong stresses in the syllables of words as
they are spoken in the English language. Strong stresses occur on the accented syllable of any multi-syllable word, and on a normally
stressed one-syllable word. Stresses do NOT occur on the unaccented syllable of a multi-syllable word, nor on unstressed one-syllable
words, so those should not be used for beats in your poetry-writing. Normally stressed one-syllable words include nouns, verbs,
adjectives or adverbs. One-syllable words that are normally weak (not stressed) are pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, articles,
and forms of the verb “to be”. A dictionary can be consulted to determine accent in multi-syllable words, and the function of one-
syllable words.
A different meter used in humorous poetry is accentual-syllabic meter. This meter requires a careful counting of ALL of the syllables,
not just the strongly-stressed syllables, in each line of the poem. Accentual-syllabic meters are pleasing to the reader’s ear. Also, the
regular pattern creates expectations in the reader, expectations that the poet can use as a tool for comedy and surprise.
In accentual-syllabic meter counting, the smallest unit is the syllable, the next unit is the “foot” (a grouping of syllables), and the
largest unit is the line. To create a line of accentual-syllabic meter in English poetry, words are chosen so that the syllables will fall
into a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (the “feet”). The lines of light verse are usually six to twelve syllables long, with
feet of two or three syllables. There are several accentual-syllabic meters commonly used in English poetry.
Iambic meter has a foot of two syllables in the pattern of unstressed-stressed “ta-DUM”. The rhythm of two iambic feet goes “ta-DUM
ta-DUM”. An example of humorous iambic meter (four feet per line) is “History of Education” by David McCord, with the stressed
syllables underlined:
The decent docent doesn’t doze:
He teaches standing on his toes.
His student dassn’t doze – and does,
And that’s what teaching is and was.
Iambic is the rhythm most like normal conversation. Lines with five iambic feet are called “iambic pentameter”, a very common meter
for English poetry. But this meter can become monotonous, so iambic lines may occasionally substitute another foot, such as trochee
(stressed-unstressed) or spondee (stressed-stressed).
Trochaic meter is sometimes used for funny poems, rather than iambic, with lines of two-syllable feet in the pattern stressed-
unstressed “DUM-ta”.
Anapestic, dactylic, and amphibrachic meter have a foot of three syllables, and feel a bit faster than iambic meter. Anapestic feet are
in the pattern of unstressed-unstressed-stressed “ta-ta-DUM”. The rhythm of two anapestic feet goes “ta-ta-DUM ta-ta-DUM”. This
example of humorous anapestic meter is from “Carmen”, a poem about the opera, by Newman Levy:
Where the castanets clink on the gay piazetta, and
strains of fandangoes are heard from afar,
There lived, I am told, a bold hussy named Carmen, a
pampered young vamp full of devil and guile.
Dactylic feet are in the pattern of stressed-unstressed-unstressed “DUM-ta-ta”. A line of two dactylic feet goes “DUM-ta-ta DUM-ta-
ta” in rhythm. This example of humorous dactylic meter is Kenneth Leonhardt’s “Conceivably, the Compleat History of Human Sex”:
Adam and Eve,/I believe,/Were the start of it.
Everyone since,/I’m convinced,/Played a part in it.
Amphibrachic feet are in the pattern of unstressed-stressed-unstressed “ta-DUM-ta”. The rhythm of two amphibrachic feet goes “ta-
DUM-ta ta-DUM-ta”. In many humorous poems, a meter of three syllables might run anapestic, dactylic, or amphibrachic in any
particular line, depending on whether the line starts with an unstressed syllable or a stressed syllable.
Humorous poems can be written in a mixture of differently-metered lines, or of shorter and longer lines in the same meter. Also, it is
common for humorous poetry to have a strong beat rhythm, like accentual meter, even when most of the lines of the poem are in an
accentual-syllabic meter. Four feet per line of many accentual-syllabic meters, such as iambic or amphibrachic, can feel like the four
beats per line of accentual meter.
It takes some trial and error to find the rhythm that works best for a particular poem. Here is a fun example from Ira Gershwin, a
master of rhythm. Fast-paced lines (three weak syllables between each beat ) are followed by slower-speech lines (only one or two
weak syllables between each beat) in this excerpt from his satirical lyric “The Babbitt and the Bromide” (in Ziegfeld Follies):
A Babbitt met a Bromide on the avenue one day.
They held a conversation in their own peculiar way.
They both were solid citizens—they both had been around.
And as they spoke you clearly saw their feet were on the ground.
Hello! How are you?
Howza folks? What’s new?
I’m great! That’s good!
Ha! Ha! Knock wood!
REFRAIN: Another element that is often used in humorous poetry is repetition. A refrain is a repeated line, or a repeated part of a
line, that is used throughout a poem.
Refrains can be used to repeat a silly phrase, or a funny name, to reinforce the light tone. An example is in the poem “Macavity: The
Mystery Cat” by T. S. Eliot, which includes two refrains that employ the cat’s name throughout the poem. The refrains are italicized in
this excerpt:
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!
Refrains and repetition can also be used with a pun, a word that has more than one meaning. Thomas Hood, a poet fond of puns,
wrote the ballad “Faithless Nelly Gray” using many repetitions of the body-part words “arms”, “legs”, and “feet”, starting with this
stanza:
Ben Battle was a soldier bold
And used to war’s alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms!
Shakespeare had fun with a refrain (italicized) using the bird-call “cuckoo” as a pun for cuckold in “Spring” (excerpt):
When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men, for thus sings he:
'Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!' O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
Now that we have explored how the elements of rhyme, rhythm, and refrain are tools for writing humorous poetry, let’s look at the
established poetic forms used for light verse in the English language.
Terse Verse: The first category of poetic forms may be called “terse verse”. These short poems use a few lines and rhymes to make
one point. The title of the poem may or may not be an important part of the humor. Types of terse verse include the Epigram and
the Epitaph.
The Epigram is a form that goes back to ancient Greek and Latin poetry, and has continued its long heritage into English poetry. It can
be serious or funny. An epigram is supposed to impart some important wisdom in a few words, and it is meant to be memorable.
Epigrams are carefully written. The title may be part of the joke. A famous humorous epigram is by Dorothy Parker:
“News Item”
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
Notice that Parker’s title is part of the humor, and she used exact two-syllable end-rhyme and two amphibrachic feet (ta-DUM-ta ta-
DUM-ta) for her lines.
An Epitaph is a poem which could go on the tombstone of a dead person. Funny ones rhyme, but the meter may not be exact in order
to seem “folksy”. Epitaphs don’t need a title if they include words like “Here lies so-and-so”. Some poets like to write their own
funny epitaph before they die! John Gay’s “My Own Epitaph” is an example:
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.
Another example is by John Ciardi:
Here, time concurring (and it does),
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.
Metered Mayhem: The next category of forms for humor can be called “metered mayhem”. These accentual meter or accentual-
syllabic meter poems require careful counting. Types of metered mayhem include poetic forms such as the Nursery Rhyme, the
Limerick, and the Double Dactyl.
A Nursery Rhyme is a poem with strong beats of accentual meter, simple words and rhymes, and a silly story. Most children (and
adults) are familiar with the common historic English nursery rhymes, such as those in Mother Goose. Modern writers create nursery
rhymes too, like “Piggy-back” by Langston Hughes:
My daddy rides me piggy-back,
My mama rides me, too.
But grandma says her poor old back
Has had enough to do.
The Limerick has been around in English poetry for a long time. Edward Lear is credited with making the clean limerick popular in his
1846 illustrated Book of Nonsense. There are hundreds of anonymous limericks, including my favorite:
There was an old lady of Ryde
Who ate some green apples, and died.
The apples (fermented
Inside the lamented)
Made cider inside ‘er inside.
The limerick form consists of five lines rhyming aabba. The “a” lines have three metrical feet, and the shorter “b” lines have two feet.
The feet have three syllables, usually anapestic or amphibrachic. The first line traditionally introduces a person and place. (Some
poets, including Lear, combine the two short “b” lines into one long line on the page, so that there are only four lines. In this case, it
would appear as if that long line has internal rhyme and four feet.)
The Double Dactyl is a modern humorous form invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal (1966 Jiggery Pokery: A Compendium of
Double Dactyls). It has eight lines. The meter of the lines is two dactyls; except the shorter lines 4 and 8, which rhyme, have only one
dactyl and a final stressed syllable. Usually, line 1 is nonsense, line 2 is a name, and another line is a six-syllable word. This example is
by E. William Seaman and Eric Salzman:
Higgledy-Piggledy
Ludwig van Beethoven
Bored by requests for some
Music to hum,
Finally answered with
Oversimplicity,
‘Here’s my Fifth Symphony:
Duh, duh, duh, DUM!’
Doggerel: These poetic forms have end-rhyme but the meter of the lines is rough, uneven. Using the derogative term “doggerel”
implies the writer is unskilled. An amateur poet may have written an awkward line because of lack of skill. But the skillful poet creates
a rough line on purpose for comic effect, like a clown wearing too-long shoes and stumbling about in them. Ogden Nash often used
doggerel in his poetry. When he varied the line length, it was with the purpose in a longer line of slowing down the presentation of
the final rhyming word, and in a shorter line to present the rhyme word quickly. Humorous doggerel forms include Skeltonics, the
Clerihew, and the Little Willie.
Skeltonics are a form named for John Skelton, who created the title of Poet Laureate for himself in 1513. These long satirical poems
use lively, irregular, short lines of two or three stresses or beats, and extend the same rhyme over two or more consecutive lines but
in no particular rhyme scheme. This is an excerpt from Skelton’s mock-mourning “Philip Sparrow”:
When I remember again
How my Philip was slain,
Never half the pain
Was between you twain,
Pyramus and Thisbe,
As then befell to me.
I wept and I wailed,
The tears down hailed,
But nothing it availed
To call Philip again
Whom Gib, our cat, hath slain.
The Clerihew form was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley for humorous brief biographies and explanations, as in his 1905 illustrated
Biography for Beginners. The four lines rhyme aabb. The first line is a name, and the second line rhymes with the name. This
clerihew is by John Peterson (Halley/daily rhyme):
Edmund Halley
Watched for comets daily.
His success was slight
Till he began watching at night.
A Little Willie poem can have any simple rhyme scheme in four or more lines, such as abab or aabb. The subject is a child (not always
Willie) who comes to a tragic end (sometimes deservedly so). The first Little Willies were composed by Harry Graham in his 1898
illustrated Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. The light tone is a vital and tricky part of the humor, so that the poem will be
experienced as funny rather than cruel by the reader. Here is an example by Graham:
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the grate and was burnt to ashes.
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke up Billy.
This anonymous one is a succinct description of the form:
Little Willie –
Pair of skates –
Hole in the ice –
Golden gates.
Refrain Forms: There are centuries-old French lyric poetic forms, such as rondeaux and ballades, which include refrains as part of the
rhyme scheme. The refrains can be used for puns or silly phrases. One of these forms is the Triolet, which in English poetry is used
exclusively for humor, and another is the Villanelle.
The Triolet has eight lines. The rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB, where A and B are the refrain lines. This silly example “Triolet” is by G.
K. Chesterton:
I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs:
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jelly fish
That hasn’t any cares,
And doesn’t even have to wish
“I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs.”
The Villanelle is another refrain form. It is used for both serious poetry and light verse. It has stanzas of three lines (tercets) in rhyme
scheme aba with refrains. The most common form in English is the Passerat model, which is nineteen lines with two A refrains: A1bA2
abA1 abA2 abA1 ab A2 abA1A2. Traditionally, all the lines have the same meter and length. A modern example of this form using the
two refrains for humor is “Voice Mail Villanelle” by Dan Skwire:
We're grateful that you called today
And sorry that we're occupied.
We will be with you right away.
Press one if you would like to stay,
Press two if you cannot decide.
We're grateful that you called today.
Press three to end this brief delay,
Press four if you believe we've lied.
We will be with you right away.
Press five to hear some music play,
Press six to speak with someone snide.
We're grateful that you called today.
Press seven if your hair's turned gray,
Press eight if you've already died.
We will be with you right away.
Press nine to hear recordings say
That service is our greatest pride.
We're grateful that you called today.
We will be with you right away.
Satire and Parody: Satire is an ancient form of literature that ridicules something or someone. There are two types of satirical poetry
which emphasize the use of poetic form, the Parody and the Mock Epic/Ode/Elegy.
The Mock Epic is a kind of poetry that combines formal language with a trivial subject for a satire on serious heroic poetry and
society. A famous example is Homer’s Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice), a parody of the Iliad. This Greek parody has
been translated into English several times. This excerpt is from Thomas Parnell’s 1716 Heroic Couplets version (iambic pentameter
rhyming lines):
The dreadful Toils of raging Mars I write,
The Springs of Contest, and the Fields of Fight;
How threatning Mice advanc'd with warlike Grace,
And wag'd dire Combats with the croaking Race.
The Mock Odes/Elegies satirize those serious poetic forms and mock their dignified subjects and lofty language. This example excerpt
is from Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” whose long, silly title signals that the
poem is satire:
'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dy'd
The azure flow'rs that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclin'd,
Gazed on the lake below.
A Parody imitates the style and thought of a literary work, author, or tradition in a humorous way. A parody poem derives its poetic
form from the original work that is being parodied. The poem being parodied must be one with which your reader is familiar for the
full humorous effect to be achieved.
In English, parodies of nursery rhymes and children’s stories are popular. Guy Wetmore Carryl wrote several books of these parodies
in poetic form, including Grimm Tales Made Gay, Mother Goose for Grown Ups, and the Aesop’s fables parody Fables for the Frivolous.
A short example is this humorous parody “Little Bo-Peep” by Frank Jacobs:
Little Bo-Peep
Has lost her sheep
And thinks they may be roaming;
They haven’t fled;
They’ve all dropped dead
From nerve gas in Wyoming.
Another favorite subject for parody in English poetry is the writing style of a famous poet. An extended example is G. K. Chesterton’s
“Variations of an Air: Composed on Having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole”, in which Chesterton rewrites the nursery rhyme
“Old King Cole” in the styles of Tennyson, Yeats, Browning, Whitman, and Swinburne.
A parody may be of a particular famous poem. A short example of this type is Bob McKenty’s parody of the style and subject in
Dorothy Parker’s “News Item”:
“Eyeglasses or No…”
Men often get amorous
With gals who are mammarous.
A modern variation on parody is William Cole’s Uncoupled Couplets, in which he takes a famous poet’s line from an English poem and
rhymes it with his own new line in the same meter, for an irreverent purpose. Here is Cole’s “Robert Herrick” parody:
Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may
But take your little pill each day.
So, how do you write a funny poem? Now you know ways to use rhyme, rhythm, and refrain in a variety of poetic forms. You probably
have ideas popping into your head for a new poem! Here are a few tips from light-verse writers for “good humor”. Following these
tips will increase venues for publishing your funny poem so that more readers can see it and enjoy it.
First of all, keep the tone of your poem civil and light. You can playfully mock, chide, tease, undermine, and debunk the most
important, popular, or sacred subjects – the king, the church, the taxes, the family, and even death. But do not let the tone become
angry, vicious, or bitter. Your humorous poem should be amusing and delightful.
Second, write the poem to be understood immediately by the reader. A funny poem doesn’t need Cliff Notes. If you have to explain
your poem afterward, it wasn’t funny. Humorous poetry requires great mental effort on your part as the writer, but it should require
little mental effort on the reader’s part. Language (words, terms) and references (things outside the poem itself, such as a person,
literary work, or event) should be familiar to your intended audience. Take this advice to keep your thesaurus handy to look for a
familiar word choice, from Franklin P. Adams’ “To a Thesaurus”:
O precious code, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work,
Attend the while I pen a poem,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.
If you know your intended audience, and it is a specific group such as chemistry students, then you could tailor the language and
references—the “jokes”—to them. The chemistry students will laugh; but nobody else will understand your poem. Sometimes you can
make that chemistry poem funny to the average reader by changing or explaining just one technical word. An example is line 4 in
Arthur Guiterman’s “On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness”:
The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar’s dead and on the shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself!
Finally, keep the language clean. Innuendo is encouraged and enjoyed. Clever puns are funny. The masters of humorous poetry don’t
need to fetch a laugh by falling into the gutter. A fill-in-the-blank forced rhyme, or a pun word, can keep your language out of the
gutter. If it’s G-rated, more publishers will accept it, and more readers will see it and enjoy it.
The masters of light verse have shared their secrets with you. Now you can start practicing their techniques. The most wonderful
thing about writing humorous poetry, according to those who write it best, is that it is as enjoyable to write a witty poem as it is to
read one!!
References:
American Wits: an Anthology of Light Verse edited by John Hollander. American Poets Project, 2003.
The Random House Treasury of Light Verse edited by Louis Phillips. Random House, New York, 1995.
The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse edited by Kingsley Amis. Oxford University Press, New York, 1978.
The Norton Book of Light Verse edited by Russell Baker. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1986.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton University Press, 1993.
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification by Timothy Steele. Ohio University Press, Athens 1999.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco. University Press of New England, Hanover 2000.
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland. W. W. Norton & Company, New
York 2000.
Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms by William Baer. Writer’s Digest Books, Cincinnati 2006.
by D. Marbach
How do you write a funny poem? The masters of humorous poetry make it look simple. Their witty poems are natural and playful. You
might think that Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham in a moment of inspiration. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters make playing
basketball look easy, so Dr. Seuss makes writing humorous poetry look easy. However, if you have ever tried to write a funny poem,
you have discovered that it isn’t easy at all. The Harlem Globetrotters practiced their spinning, throwing, bouncing, and other
techniques for a long time to become comic masters with that ball. Dr. Seuss took a year to write The Cat in the Hat, with careful
attention to detail, and many revisions of the exact wording of his humorous verse.
There is no defined genre in English literature for funny poems. Literary scholars have not put effort into studying humorous poetry as
an art. They lump all the funny poems into the vague category “light verse” and view them as undeserving of serious consideration.
But A.A. Milne said light verse “is the supreme exhibition of somebody’s definition of art, the concealment of art. In the result it
observes the most exact laws of rhythm and metre as if by a happy accident, and in a sort of nonchalant spirit of mockery at the real
poets who do it on purpose.” The best writers of light verse are masters of poetic form.
Some of the witty poets wrote a lot of light verse and are famous for it. These include writers like Edward Lear, Arthur Guiterman,
Harry Graham, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash. Such witty poets are known for their inventive humorous poetic styles and devices.
Other witty poets were better known for their serious poetry, or for their prose writings, but they also wrote light verse. This
includes a large number of writers, such as Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc, A. A. Milne, and T. S. Eliot. Even Shakespeare,
who wrote so eloquently about romantic love in his famous sonnets, used his poetic skill to mock love in lesser-known light verses.
Writing humorous poetry is technical work. It is akin to juggling a tower of spinning plates without dropping any of them, until just the
right moment when the tower seems to crumble unexpectedly and the juggler catches every plate, to the surprise and delight of the
audience. The writer uses rhyme, rhythm, and refrain to tickle the reader’s funny bone in a variety of poetic forms intended for
humor. Let’s study some of the techniques used in writing humorous poetry, starting with the elements of rhyme, rhythm, and refrain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
RHYME: Rhyme is an important tool for creating light verse in the English language. Almost all the humorous poems ever written in
English have a pattern of end-rhymes. Rhyme delights the reader’s ear, and it makes the poem simpler for the reader to understand.
A fault of end-rhyme can endanger the structure of a funny poem with its awkwardness. When constructing end-rhymes in a
humorous poem, it is best to use the most exact rhymes possible. The vowel sound and consonant sound in the last syllable of the last
word of each of the two lines should rhyme perfectly to the ear, such as talk/walk, talk/hawk, or talk/cornstalk. A dictionary can be
consulted for pronunciation of end-words, and a rhyming dictionary can be used to find rhyming words.
Funny poems often include further playfulness with rhyme, such as internal rhyme and multi-syllable rhymes. Internal rhyme can be a
little surprise for your reader, by adding a word within a line that rhymes with the word at the end of that line. W. H. Auden used this
fun device (most/post) in stanzas of “Foxtrot” (excerpt):
The blackbird loves the earthworm,
The adder loves the sun,
The polar bear an iceberg,
The elephant a bun,
The trout enjoys the river,
The whale enjoys the sea,
And dogs love most an old lamp-post,
But you’re my cup of tea.
Multi-syllable rhymes can be created in several ways. For creating two-syllable rhymes, poets can use two-syllable words
(thinning/winning), or longer words (fated/liberated), or two separate words acting together (beseech him/impeach him). A multi-
syllable rhyme can be composed by a combination of a long word in a line and two or more short words in the other line, called a
“mosaic rhyme” (installment/Paul meant). The accented syllable in the rhyming sequence should match in both lines. An exact rhyme
is surrender with pretender, which both have the accent on the next-to-last syllable of the line. In contrast, for the two-syllable
rhyme “enic”, arsenic would not be an exact rhyme with hygienic because the accented syllable does not fall in the same place
within the last two syllables of each word.
Many masters of light verse use an occasional “triple rhyme” of three syllables to amuse the reader, emphasize a theme, or create a
punch line. The triple rhyme can consist of two long words, (posterity/rarity), or it can be a mosaic rhyme (posterity/spare it he).
The accented syllables of the triple rhyme should match, so as to make the rhyme sequence sound polished to the ear. Byron
employed many triple rhymes in his humorous poetry, such as this excerpt from “Dedication” in Don Juan:
Bob Southey! You're a poet--Poet-laureate,
And representative of all the race;
Although 'tis true that you turn'd out a Tory at
Last--yours has lately been a common case;
And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
Humorous poems may include the device of “broken rhyme” for an end-rhyme. Broken rhyme is the division of a word at the end of a
line by hyphenating it, in order to produce a rhyme sound with the end of the next line. An example is this excerpt from Edward Lear’
s self-portrait poem which begins “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear”:
When he walks in his waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, ‘He’s run out in his night-
gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!
Broken rhymes are playful and they help to link lines together as the poem flows along. They can be used to surprise the reader with
“what comes next” in the lines.
Another type of humorous rhyme that poets use is the forced rhyme. In the sequence of a forced rhyme combination, a first end-word
is used which then forces the reader to pronounce and accent the next rhyming end-word in a particular way in order to match the
first one. There are several reasons for using a forced rhyme.
Forced rhyme can be used for a sense of closure at the end of a line, or to give prominence to a particular word. An example is
Hilaire Belloc’s poem “Lord Finchley”, which forces an unnaturally long secondary accent onto the last syllable of the last word:
Lord Finchley tried to mend the electric light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
A forced rhyme can be used to help the reader with pronouncing an unusual word, an invented word, or a nonsense word at the end
of a line. Unusual words are used in humorous poetry, but how will your reader know how to say these words? The forced rhyme is a
helpful tool to make the unusual word easier for the reader to pronounce in the way the poet intends. An example is Mark Twain’s
limerick “A Man Hired by John Smith and Co.”, which mocks the use of the abbreviation “Co.” for the word “Company” with Twain’s
two invented abbreviations. (Read this poem slowly and aloud for best effect, remembering the word “company” is the rhyme to
match.)
A man hired by John Smith and Co.
Loudly declared he would tho.
Man that he saw
Dumping dirt near his store.
The drivers, therefore, didn’t do.
Lastly, the forced rhyme can be used in poems where the poet has declined to write the ending to a line because it is not G-rated
(sex, violence, language). Sometimes it is funnier to let the reader “fill in the blank” with a forced rhyme than to state the actual
words. An example is this excerpt of rhyming couplets from Lewis Carroll’s “‘Tis the Voice of the Lobster”:
I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by -------.
Another example is this printer’s humor from the Boston Globe newspaper “An Arab and His Donkey”, using the asterisk symbol to
represent three deleted words that rhyme with “isk” and sound like “asterisk”:
An Arab came to the river side,
With a donkey bearing an obelisk;
But he would not try to ford the tide,
For he had too good an * .
RHYTHM: In comedy, timing is everything. The poetic element of rhythm is often used in witty verse. Writers can skillfully and
purposefully use rhythm to propel the reader along in a fast gallop, to slow down the reader for a longer look, or to surprise the
reader with something sudden and unexpected at the end of the ride.
Rhythm in light verse can be measured out using either of two types of meter. The simpler type of meter is “accentual meter”. The
more exact meter is “accentual-syllabic meter”. The first line of the poem is most important in setting the rhythm for your reader, so
it should be written carefully in the meter you choose.
Accentual meter is a counting of the strongly-stressed syllables, or “beats”, in each line of the poem. Good accentual meter is like
the beat of a drum or the clapping of hands. It is natural and light-hearted. Weaker syllables before, between, and after the beat
syllables are not counted. The beats are strongly spoken, and they are evenly spaced in time. Most accentual meter has four beats
per line. The weaker syllables are spoken during the time between the beats. There may be brief pauses in the middle of the line or
at the end of the line, and a strong beat might fall on an unspoken pause.
Nursery rhymes and ballads are written in accentual meter. A common pattern for an English nursery rhyme is four spoken beats in
the first line, and three spoken beats in the second line. The second line has a fourth unspoken beat at the end in a pause. Here is
the nursery rhyme “Little Jack Horner” with the beats underlined:
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating a Christmas pie.
He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum,
And said “What a good boy am I !”
Another nursery rhyme with the same accentual meter is “Little Miss Muffet”. If one person chants aloud Jack’s poem, and another
person chants aloud Muffet’s poem, starting at the same time and clapping the four beats per line together, they will not be speaking
the same words but they will end their poems at the same time. (Remember, there is a fourth beat on the unspoken pause at the end
of line 2 and line 4).
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider and sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away!
Although the weaker syllables are not counted in accentual meter, it is important not to tangle the reader’s tongue. The reader can
only squeeze about three weak syllables between beats. The more weak syllables there are in a line of accentual meter, the faster
the line will feel.
To write a line of accentual meter, words are chosen so that the beat will fall on naturally-strong stresses in the syllables of words as
they are spoken in the English language. Strong stresses occur on the accented syllable of any multi-syllable word, and on a normally
stressed one-syllable word. Stresses do NOT occur on the unaccented syllable of a multi-syllable word, nor on unstressed one-syllable
words, so those should not be used for beats in your poetry-writing. Normally stressed one-syllable words include nouns, verbs,
adjectives or adverbs. One-syllable words that are normally weak (not stressed) are pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, articles,
and forms of the verb “to be”. A dictionary can be consulted to determine accent in multi-syllable words, and the function of one-
syllable words.
A different meter used in humorous poetry is accentual-syllabic meter. This meter requires a careful counting of ALL of the syllables,
not just the strongly-stressed syllables, in each line of the poem. Accentual-syllabic meters are pleasing to the reader’s ear. Also, the
regular pattern creates expectations in the reader, expectations that the poet can use as a tool for comedy and surprise.
In accentual-syllabic meter counting, the smallest unit is the syllable, the next unit is the “foot” (a grouping of syllables), and the
largest unit is the line. To create a line of accentual-syllabic meter in English poetry, words are chosen so that the syllables will fall
into a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (the “feet”). The lines of light verse are usually six to twelve syllables long, with
feet of two or three syllables. There are several accentual-syllabic meters commonly used in English poetry.
Iambic meter has a foot of two syllables in the pattern of unstressed-stressed “ta-DUM”. The rhythm of two iambic feet goes “ta-DUM
ta-DUM”. An example of humorous iambic meter (four feet per line) is “History of Education” by David McCord, with the stressed
syllables underlined:
The decent docent doesn’t doze:
He teaches standing on his toes.
His student dassn’t doze – and does,
And that’s what teaching is and was.
Iambic is the rhythm most like normal conversation. Lines with five iambic feet are called “iambic pentameter”, a very common meter
for English poetry. But this meter can become monotonous, so iambic lines may occasionally substitute another foot, such as trochee
(stressed-unstressed) or spondee (stressed-stressed).
Trochaic meter is sometimes used for funny poems, rather than iambic, with lines of two-syllable feet in the pattern stressed-
unstressed “DUM-ta”.
Anapestic, dactylic, and amphibrachic meter have a foot of three syllables, and feel a bit faster than iambic meter. Anapestic feet are
in the pattern of unstressed-unstressed-stressed “ta-ta-DUM”. The rhythm of two anapestic feet goes “ta-ta-DUM ta-ta-DUM”. This
example of humorous anapestic meter is from “Carmen”, a poem about the opera, by Newman Levy:
Where the castanets clink on the gay piazetta, and
strains of fandangoes are heard from afar,
There lived, I am told, a bold hussy named Carmen, a
pampered young vamp full of devil and guile.
Dactylic feet are in the pattern of stressed-unstressed-unstressed “DUM-ta-ta”. A line of two dactylic feet goes “DUM-ta-ta DUM-ta-
ta” in rhythm. This example of humorous dactylic meter is Kenneth Leonhardt’s “Conceivably, the Compleat History of Human Sex”:
Adam and Eve,/I believe,/Were the start of it.
Everyone since,/I’m convinced,/Played a part in it.
Amphibrachic feet are in the pattern of unstressed-stressed-unstressed “ta-DUM-ta”. The rhythm of two amphibrachic feet goes “ta-
DUM-ta ta-DUM-ta”. In many humorous poems, a meter of three syllables might run anapestic, dactylic, or amphibrachic in any
particular line, depending on whether the line starts with an unstressed syllable or a stressed syllable.
Humorous poems can be written in a mixture of differently-metered lines, or of shorter and longer lines in the same meter. Also, it is
common for humorous poetry to have a strong beat rhythm, like accentual meter, even when most of the lines of the poem are in an
accentual-syllabic meter. Four feet per line of many accentual-syllabic meters, such as iambic or amphibrachic, can feel like the four
beats per line of accentual meter.
It takes some trial and error to find the rhythm that works best for a particular poem. Here is a fun example from Ira Gershwin, a
master of rhythm. Fast-paced lines (three weak syllables between each beat ) are followed by slower-speech lines (only one or two
weak syllables between each beat) in this excerpt from his satirical lyric “The Babbitt and the Bromide” (in Ziegfeld Follies):
A Babbitt met a Bromide on the avenue one day.
They held a conversation in their own peculiar way.
They both were solid citizens—they both had been around.
And as they spoke you clearly saw their feet were on the ground.
Hello! How are you?
Howza folks? What’s new?
I’m great! That’s good!
Ha! Ha! Knock wood!
REFRAIN: Another element that is often used in humorous poetry is repetition. A refrain is a repeated line, or a repeated part of a
line, that is used throughout a poem.
Refrains can be used to repeat a silly phrase, or a funny name, to reinforce the light tone. An example is in the poem “Macavity: The
Mystery Cat” by T. S. Eliot, which includes two refrains that employ the cat’s name throughout the poem. The refrains are italicized in
this excerpt:
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!
Refrains and repetition can also be used with a pun, a word that has more than one meaning. Thomas Hood, a poet fond of puns,
wrote the ballad “Faithless Nelly Gray” using many repetitions of the body-part words “arms”, “legs”, and “feet”, starting with this
stanza:
Ben Battle was a soldier bold
And used to war’s alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms!
Shakespeare had fun with a refrain (italicized) using the bird-call “cuckoo” as a pun for cuckold in “Spring” (excerpt):
When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men, for thus sings he:
'Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!' O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
Now that we have explored how the elements of rhyme, rhythm, and refrain are tools for writing humorous poetry, let’s look at the
established poetic forms used for light verse in the English language.
Terse Verse: The first category of poetic forms may be called “terse verse”. These short poems use a few lines and rhymes to make
one point. The title of the poem may or may not be an important part of the humor. Types of terse verse include the Epigram and
the Epitaph.
The Epigram is a form that goes back to ancient Greek and Latin poetry, and has continued its long heritage into English poetry. It can
be serious or funny. An epigram is supposed to impart some important wisdom in a few words, and it is meant to be memorable.
Epigrams are carefully written. The title may be part of the joke. A famous humorous epigram is by Dorothy Parker:
“News Item”
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
Notice that Parker’s title is part of the humor, and she used exact two-syllable end-rhyme and two amphibrachic feet (ta-DUM-ta ta-
DUM-ta) for her lines.
An Epitaph is a poem which could go on the tombstone of a dead person. Funny ones rhyme, but the meter may not be exact in order
to seem “folksy”. Epitaphs don’t need a title if they include words like “Here lies so-and-so”. Some poets like to write their own
funny epitaph before they die! John Gay’s “My Own Epitaph” is an example:
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.
Another example is by John Ciardi:
Here, time concurring (and it does),
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.
Metered Mayhem: The next category of forms for humor can be called “metered mayhem”. These accentual meter or accentual-
syllabic meter poems require careful counting. Types of metered mayhem include poetic forms such as the Nursery Rhyme, the
Limerick, and the Double Dactyl.
A Nursery Rhyme is a poem with strong beats of accentual meter, simple words and rhymes, and a silly story. Most children (and
adults) are familiar with the common historic English nursery rhymes, such as those in Mother Goose. Modern writers create nursery
rhymes too, like “Piggy-back” by Langston Hughes:
My daddy rides me piggy-back,
My mama rides me, too.
But grandma says her poor old back
Has had enough to do.
The Limerick has been around in English poetry for a long time. Edward Lear is credited with making the clean limerick popular in his
1846 illustrated Book of Nonsense. There are hundreds of anonymous limericks, including my favorite:
There was an old lady of Ryde
Who ate some green apples, and died.
The apples (fermented
Inside the lamented)
Made cider inside ‘er inside.
The limerick form consists of five lines rhyming aabba. The “a” lines have three metrical feet, and the shorter “b” lines have two feet.
The feet have three syllables, usually anapestic or amphibrachic. The first line traditionally introduces a person and place. (Some
poets, including Lear, combine the two short “b” lines into one long line on the page, so that there are only four lines. In this case, it
would appear as if that long line has internal rhyme and four feet.)
The Double Dactyl is a modern humorous form invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal (1966 Jiggery Pokery: A Compendium of
Double Dactyls). It has eight lines. The meter of the lines is two dactyls; except the shorter lines 4 and 8, which rhyme, have only one
dactyl and a final stressed syllable. Usually, line 1 is nonsense, line 2 is a name, and another line is a six-syllable word. This example is
by E. William Seaman and Eric Salzman:
Higgledy-Piggledy
Ludwig van Beethoven
Bored by requests for some
Music to hum,
Finally answered with
Oversimplicity,
‘Here’s my Fifth Symphony:
Duh, duh, duh, DUM!’
Doggerel: These poetic forms have end-rhyme but the meter of the lines is rough, uneven. Using the derogative term “doggerel”
implies the writer is unskilled. An amateur poet may have written an awkward line because of lack of skill. But the skillful poet creates
a rough line on purpose for comic effect, like a clown wearing too-long shoes and stumbling about in them. Ogden Nash often used
doggerel in his poetry. When he varied the line length, it was with the purpose in a longer line of slowing down the presentation of
the final rhyming word, and in a shorter line to present the rhyme word quickly. Humorous doggerel forms include Skeltonics, the
Clerihew, and the Little Willie.
Skeltonics are a form named for John Skelton, who created the title of Poet Laureate for himself in 1513. These long satirical poems
use lively, irregular, short lines of two or three stresses or beats, and extend the same rhyme over two or more consecutive lines but
in no particular rhyme scheme. This is an excerpt from Skelton’s mock-mourning “Philip Sparrow”:
When I remember again
How my Philip was slain,
Never half the pain
Was between you twain,
Pyramus and Thisbe,
As then befell to me.
I wept and I wailed,
The tears down hailed,
But nothing it availed
To call Philip again
Whom Gib, our cat, hath slain.
The Clerihew form was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley for humorous brief biographies and explanations, as in his 1905 illustrated
Biography for Beginners. The four lines rhyme aabb. The first line is a name, and the second line rhymes with the name. This
clerihew is by John Peterson (Halley/daily rhyme):
Edmund Halley
Watched for comets daily.
His success was slight
Till he began watching at night.
A Little Willie poem can have any simple rhyme scheme in four or more lines, such as abab or aabb. The subject is a child (not always
Willie) who comes to a tragic end (sometimes deservedly so). The first Little Willies were composed by Harry Graham in his 1898
illustrated Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. The light tone is a vital and tricky part of the humor, so that the poem will be
experienced as funny rather than cruel by the reader. Here is an example by Graham:
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the grate and was burnt to ashes.
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke up Billy.
This anonymous one is a succinct description of the form:
Little Willie –
Pair of skates –
Hole in the ice –
Golden gates.
Refrain Forms: There are centuries-old French lyric poetic forms, such as rondeaux and ballades, which include refrains as part of the
rhyme scheme. The refrains can be used for puns or silly phrases. One of these forms is the Triolet, which in English poetry is used
exclusively for humor, and another is the Villanelle.
The Triolet has eight lines. The rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB, where A and B are the refrain lines. This silly example “Triolet” is by G.
K. Chesterton:
I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs:
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jelly fish
That hasn’t any cares,
And doesn’t even have to wish
“I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs.”
The Villanelle is another refrain form. It is used for both serious poetry and light verse. It has stanzas of three lines (tercets) in rhyme
scheme aba with refrains. The most common form in English is the Passerat model, which is nineteen lines with two A refrains: A1bA2
abA1 abA2 abA1 ab A2 abA1A2. Traditionally, all the lines have the same meter and length. A modern example of this form using the
two refrains for humor is “Voice Mail Villanelle” by Dan Skwire:
We're grateful that you called today
And sorry that we're occupied.
We will be with you right away.
Press one if you would like to stay,
Press two if you cannot decide.
We're grateful that you called today.
Press three to end this brief delay,
Press four if you believe we've lied.
We will be with you right away.
Press five to hear some music play,
Press six to speak with someone snide.
We're grateful that you called today.
Press seven if your hair's turned gray,
Press eight if you've already died.
We will be with you right away.
Press nine to hear recordings say
That service is our greatest pride.
We're grateful that you called today.
We will be with you right away.
Satire and Parody: Satire is an ancient form of literature that ridicules something or someone. There are two types of satirical poetry
which emphasize the use of poetic form, the Parody and the Mock Epic/Ode/Elegy.
The Mock Epic is a kind of poetry that combines formal language with a trivial subject for a satire on serious heroic poetry and
society. A famous example is Homer’s Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice), a parody of the Iliad. This Greek parody has
been translated into English several times. This excerpt is from Thomas Parnell’s 1716 Heroic Couplets version (iambic pentameter
rhyming lines):
The dreadful Toils of raging Mars I write,
The Springs of Contest, and the Fields of Fight;
How threatning Mice advanc'd with warlike Grace,
And wag'd dire Combats with the croaking Race.
The Mock Odes/Elegies satirize those serious poetic forms and mock their dignified subjects and lofty language. This example excerpt
is from Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” whose long, silly title signals that the
poem is satire:
'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dy'd
The azure flow'rs that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclin'd,
Gazed on the lake below.
A Parody imitates the style and thought of a literary work, author, or tradition in a humorous way. A parody poem derives its poetic
form from the original work that is being parodied. The poem being parodied must be one with which your reader is familiar for the
full humorous effect to be achieved.
In English, parodies of nursery rhymes and children’s stories are popular. Guy Wetmore Carryl wrote several books of these parodies
in poetic form, including Grimm Tales Made Gay, Mother Goose for Grown Ups, and the Aesop’s fables parody Fables for the Frivolous.
A short example is this humorous parody “Little Bo-Peep” by Frank Jacobs:
Little Bo-Peep
Has lost her sheep
And thinks they may be roaming;
They haven’t fled;
They’ve all dropped dead
From nerve gas in Wyoming.
Another favorite subject for parody in English poetry is the writing style of a famous poet. An extended example is G. K. Chesterton’s
“Variations of an Air: Composed on Having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole”, in which Chesterton rewrites the nursery rhyme
“Old King Cole” in the styles of Tennyson, Yeats, Browning, Whitman, and Swinburne.
A parody may be of a particular famous poem. A short example of this type is Bob McKenty’s parody of the style and subject in
Dorothy Parker’s “News Item”:
“Eyeglasses or No…”
Men often get amorous
With gals who are mammarous.
A modern variation on parody is William Cole’s Uncoupled Couplets, in which he takes a famous poet’s line from an English poem and
rhymes it with his own new line in the same meter, for an irreverent purpose. Here is Cole’s “Robert Herrick” parody:
Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may
But take your little pill each day.
So, how do you write a funny poem? Now you know ways to use rhyme, rhythm, and refrain in a variety of poetic forms. You probably
have ideas popping into your head for a new poem! Here are a few tips from light-verse writers for “good humor”. Following these
tips will increase venues for publishing your funny poem so that more readers can see it and enjoy it.
First of all, keep the tone of your poem civil and light. You can playfully mock, chide, tease, undermine, and debunk the most
important, popular, or sacred subjects – the king, the church, the taxes, the family, and even death. But do not let the tone become
angry, vicious, or bitter. Your humorous poem should be amusing and delightful.
Second, write the poem to be understood immediately by the reader. A funny poem doesn’t need Cliff Notes. If you have to explain
your poem afterward, it wasn’t funny. Humorous poetry requires great mental effort on your part as the writer, but it should require
little mental effort on the reader’s part. Language (words, terms) and references (things outside the poem itself, such as a person,
literary work, or event) should be familiar to your intended audience. Take this advice to keep your thesaurus handy to look for a
familiar word choice, from Franklin P. Adams’ “To a Thesaurus”:
O precious code, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work,
Attend the while I pen a poem,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.
If you know your intended audience, and it is a specific group such as chemistry students, then you could tailor the language and
references—the “jokes”—to them. The chemistry students will laugh; but nobody else will understand your poem. Sometimes you can
make that chemistry poem funny to the average reader by changing or explaining just one technical word. An example is line 4 in
Arthur Guiterman’s “On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness”:
The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar’s dead and on the shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself!
Finally, keep the language clean. Innuendo is encouraged and enjoyed. Clever puns are funny. The masters of humorous poetry don’t
need to fetch a laugh by falling into the gutter. A fill-in-the-blank forced rhyme, or a pun word, can keep your language out of the
gutter. If it’s G-rated, more publishers will accept it, and more readers will see it and enjoy it.
The masters of light verse have shared their secrets with you. Now you can start practicing their techniques. The most wonderful
thing about writing humorous poetry, according to those who write it best, is that it is as enjoyable to write a witty poem as it is to
read one!!
References:
American Wits: an Anthology of Light Verse edited by John Hollander. American Poets Project, 2003.
The Random House Treasury of Light Verse edited by Louis Phillips. Random House, New York, 1995.
The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse edited by Kingsley Amis. Oxford University Press, New York, 1978.
The Norton Book of Light Verse edited by Russell Baker. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1986.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton University Press, 1993.
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification by Timothy Steele. Ohio University Press, Athens 1999.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco. University Press of New England, Hanover 2000.
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland. W. W. Norton & Company, New
York 2000.
Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms by William Baer. Writer’s Digest Books, Cincinnati 2006.
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The Sestina: A Moment in the Eternal
by D. Marbach
The sestina is a poetic form with a long history. It was invented in the twelfth century by Arnaut Daniel, a poet and mathematician in
medieval southern France. The form is complicated, repetitive, sometimes obsessive. It has been described as a reverie, a folding flame,
a braid, and a squared circle. If it is so complicated, why would anyone want to write one of these poems? Why would anyone bother
to read one? Because, in the sestina form, the poet and the reader can share the magical experience of a moment in the eternal –
the simultaneously linear and circular nature of time.
The standard sestina form is 39 lines. Each line is the same length in syllables or meter. The lines are arranged is seven stanzas. There
are 6 six-line stanzas and 1 three-line stanza. The six-line stanza is called a sestet, and the three-line stanza is called the envoy. The
last word of each line is called an end-word or teleuton. The six teleutons of the first sestet recur as the end-words of the other
sestets, but in a changing order. No sestets have the same order. The envoy uses all of the six teleutons, three of them as end-words
and three within its lines, in any order. If we number each teleuton in the first stanza, the standard mix-up order for changing the
end-words throughout the poem is as follows:
First stanza: 123456
Second stanza: 615243
Third stanza: 364125
Fourth stanza: 532614
Fifth stanza: 451362
Sixth stanza: 246531
Envoy (example order): (2)5, (4)3, (6)1
Notice that the last number of each sestet becomes the first number of the next sestet (6-6, 3-3, 5-5, 4-4, 2-2), creating a flow pattern
between sestets and a close recurrence of that end-word.
Many medieval Europeans saw earthly time as linear and advancing toward death, while they imagined heavenly time as perfect and
eternal like a circle. It is the “chiming” nature of the teleutons at the end of the measured lines that mimics the linear and circular
nature of time. Imagine an old clock. It chimes each new hour today, in a linear order: 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock, and so on. It chimed
those same numbered hours yesterday. But today the sounding of the hour may mean something new to you when you hear it.
Similarly, each recurrence of the teleuton adds a new meaning within the context of the current sestet, and simultaneously echoes its
former meaning from the previous sestets. The poem marches forward in time, while also circling back around.
The envoy of the sestina is a conclusion or summary. The six teleutons “gather on stage to take that final bow—as though saying this is
about to be over—but you won't be the same now… It puts an end to the cyclic character of the six [sestets] and opens the door back
into quotidian time.”1 The envoy may be arranged by the poet so that the teleutons are in their original order in its three lines—(1)2, (3)
4, (5)6—to emphasize the return to normal daily time.
After its invention by Daniel, the sestina form became popular with troubadours, who enjoyed composing complicated poetry.
Eventually, sestinas were being written in Italy by accomplished poets such as Petrarch and Dante. The form received the name
“sestina” from the Italian language because of its use of the number six. The form continued spreading throughout medieval Europe
and into England. The first known English sestina is Philip Sidney’s “Yee Gote-heard Gods” (You Goat-Herd Gods) in his 1590 Arcadia.
The first sestet is:
You goatherd gods, that love the grassy mountains,
You nymphs which haunt the springs in pleasant valleys,
You satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
Which to my woes gives still an early morning,
And draws the dolor on till weary evening.
The lines of the standard sestina were all the same length or meter. Historically, in French they were alexandrines (12 syllables). The
Italians used hendecasyllabic lines (11 syllables). In English the lines were usually decasyllabic (10 syllables) or the popular iambic
pentameter (10 syllables with the unaccented and accented syllables occurring as ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM). Sydney’s
Goat-Herd sestina has lines of 11 syllables that are iambic pentameter with an extra syllable at the end.
Pontus de Tyard introduced a rhymed version of the sestina in France in the sixteenth century, using the rhyme scheme abcbca in the
first stanza. But early English sestinas were usually not rhymed. Later, in the nineteenth century, the English rhyming sestina was
popularized by Algernon Charles Swinburne. He used a variety of schemes to achieve rhyme. One scheme rhymed the first sestet
ababab and then used a mix-up pattern for each of the other sestets that alternated odd- and even-numbered teleutons, so all the
sestets rhymed ababab. His mix-up pattern still maintained the traditional flow between sestets (6-6, 3-3, 5-5, 4-4, 2-2). An example is
Swinburne’s “Sestina”:
I saw my soul at rest upon a day
As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,
Among soft leaves that give the starlight way
To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;
So that it knew as one in visions may,
And knew not as men waking, of delight.
Other schemes to achieve rhyme in English sestinas have been used, including Tyard’s abcbca scheme. The mix-up pattern of rhyming
sestinas may be altered to prevent couplets within a sestet. In English sestinas, couplets (two lines rhyming in succession) are often
avoided, since couplets create a sense of comfortable finality or conclusion, which is not usually wanted in the sestina form.
English poets have doubled the sestina in several ways. Sidney’s “Yee Gote-heard Gods” is a double sestina of twelve six-line stanzas.
Swinburne crafted “The Complaint of Lisa” in twelve twelve-line stanzas, and he also rhymed it! This is the first stanza with twelve
teleutons:
There is no woman living that draws breath
So sad as I, though all things sadden her.
There is not one upon life's weariest way
Who is weary as I am weary of all but death.
Toward whom I look as looks the sunflower
All day with all his whole soul toward the sun;
While in the sun's sight I make moan all day,
And all night on my sleepless maiden bed
Weep and call out on death, O Love, and thee,
That thou or he would take me to the dead,
And know not what thing evil I have done
That life should lay such heavy hand on me.
Should today’s poet use the historic sestina form? Can modern poetry be written in such an old-fashioned way? Modern writers have
composed some of their most beautiful poems in the sestina form. They have kept the basic strengths of the standard sestina form
while creating interesting variations that are very effective for conveying the poet’s message to the reader.
Modern writers are inventive with varying the teleutons to keep the end-words from becoming too repetitive, too distracting from the
poet’s intended message. An historic technique for breaking the repetitive effect of a teleuton is to use an identically-spelled word.
This can include either a homograph or a homonym. A homograph is an identically-spelled word with a different sound and meaning,
such as the noun “wind” (air that is blowing) and the verb “wind” (to turn a clock). A homonym is an identically-spelled word with the
same sound but a different meaning, such as the noun “rose” ( a flower) and the verb “rose” (to have risen up) in J. E. Ball’s “A Sestina
of Memories”. A modern technique is to use homophones, words that may be spelled differently but sound identical, such as “to” and
“two”. Modern writers also use different words that begin or end with a similar sound, such as “light”, “delight”, and “lightning”.
Variation in end-words is best done for a purpose, and done sparingly, so that the chiming effect of recurring teleutons is not lost for
the reader. An example is Anthony Hecht’s sestina “The Book of Yolek” about a little boy in Germany, which begins:
The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.
Hecht varied the teleuton “to” later as “too”, “tattoo” and “1942”. These end-words sound alike to the reader, and the variations allow
him to introduce important events for the reader. Hecht did not vary the other five teleutons (meal, walk, home, camp, day). As the
poem unfolds, the change in meaning of these five simple end-words as they chime in the context of each new sestet produces a
dramatic and haunting effect.
The tradition of measured line length is often abandoned by modern writers. The danger is that end-words in unmeasured lines may
lose their chiming value. However, varying the line length skillfully can enhance the sestina while maintaining the chiming, especially
with unusual or powerful end-words such as “zephyr” or “clash”. For example, Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” has lines that run in
varying syllabic length and irregular rhythm. The poem is a dramatic monologue crafted to sound like the informal speech of an angry
man, as in the third sestet:
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour's stour than a year's peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there's no wine like the blood's crimson!
Another creative modern line-length variation with a purpose is the “diminishing sestina”, whose lines become shorter until only the
teleutons remain. Examples include Miller Williams’ “The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina” and Alan Ansen’s “A Fit of Something Against
Something”. Williams’ diminishing sestina starts with long, slow lines in the first sestet, and each sestet’s lines are progressively shorter
and faster as the poet’s message becomes more urgent about his children leaving home and his wanting to see them, until the sixth
stanza has only the teleutons:
Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.
His envoy returns to long lines, in an apology for the blurting urgency of that short sestet.
Ansen’s sestina progresses through a history of the sestina form, lamenting its change. The first sestet has overly-long lines about the
sestina’s glorious origins, and each subsequent sestet has shorter lines about literary periods, until the poem reaches the envoy
composed only of the six teleutons as a modern poet declares:
Sestina order,
Austere master,
BE GONE!!
Some modern poets, in troubadour fashion, have made their sestina form more difficult by adding rules and restrictions. Jonah Winter
composed a sestina with the same end-word “Bob” for every line, in “Sestina: Bob” about a man’s obsession with his ex-girlfriend’s new
boyfriend. Wesli Court used all six teleutons in the first line of each of the stanzas in his sestina “The Obsession” about a recurring
dream.
Other modern poets have composed shorter sestina-like poems, achieving the effect of the sestina without its length. An example is
Helen Frost’s “Grandma Keeps Forgetting”, a “tritina”. These shorter poems should include end-words in stanzas, a changing mix-up
pattern for the order of the end-words, flow pattern from stanza to stanza, and an envoy composed of all the teleutons. The
“quatrina” has four 4-line stanzas (quatrains) and a 2-line envoy. All four teleutons are used in the envoy, two of them as its end-
words. There are several possible mix-up orders for the quatrains, including: 1234, 4123, 3412, 2341, envoy. The “tritina” has three 3-
line stanzas (tercets) and a one-line envoy. The three teleutons occur in the envoy, one of them as its end-word. A possible mix-up
order is: 123, 312, 231, envoy.
How can you write a sestina? Here are some tips for making the process easier:
Start by attempting a shorter form, like the tritina.
Pick a topic, theme, or subject. Perhaps you want to tell a little story in your poem. Perhaps you want to examine the changing
nature of something.
Choose the teleutons. The teleutons should support the topic you picked. Some writers recommend nouns. These can be concrete
nouns (table, girl), abstract nouns (sadness, grace), pronouns (she, it), and proper nouns (Sally, New York). You may want to try a verb
(run), preposition (by), or adjective (red) instead. The end-words are going to be repeated, so you can use that repetition to create
an effect. Choose a word that is simple in meaning (forest) if you want the word to chime the same for the reader throughout the
poem. Or, choose a word that is rich in meanings (break) if you want to change the meaning for the reader as the poem unfolds. To
find out whether a word has one meaning or several different meanings in the English language, you can use your dictionary. You may
want to explore the change in a loaded teleuton like “father” in a story-poem. Do you want the end-word to blend into the
background of the poem (me, to), or do you want it to be obvious (rhinoceros)? To create tension in the poem, choose a couple of
end-words that are opposites (light & dark, earth & heaven). The mood of a poem will be strengthened by choosing a teleuton that
chimes it (agony, joy). You can start with a list of more teleutons than are required, and then drop the ones that don’t work as you
write the poem.
Begin writing your stanzas. Some writers suggest that you start with the short envoy. This will give you a well-crafted conclusion to
your poem, and will help you make a final selection of the important teleutons. Try to make all the lines of your envoy measure the
same length in syllables or meter. Suzanne, link this to our website’s Resources new article on meter. Once you have established a
length and rhythm that works for you, it can be used for writing the rest of the poem.
As you start on the longer stanzas, carefully put the teleutons in the mix-up order required. An easy way to get the order is to use
Joshua Mandel’s “sestina generator” website, or Helen Frost’s “worksheets for forms” website.
When writing each line, you can draw attention to a teleuton by making it the end of the sentence as well as the end of the line. Or
you can soften the chiming of a teleuton by enjambing the line (carry the meaning over from that line to the next line). A technique
that will break the repetitive effect of a teleuton is to use a homonym or homograph.
Check the measure of each line after you finish the stanza. If a line in your stanza is longer or shorter in measure than the other lines,
and you didn’t do that for a purpose or effect, try to re-write that line.
Don’t be discouraged if your drafted sestina requires revising! You are composing a poem that is both linear and circular. Your reader
will be haunted and uplifted when you capture “a moment in the eternal”. Keep on writing!
References and Footnotes:
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton University Press, 1993.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco. University Press of New England, Hanover 2000.
“Obsession and the Sestina Form” by Margaret Spanos, in Bloom’s Major Poets: Dante
edited by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, Pennsylvania 2001.
Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms by William Baer. Writer’s Digest Books, Cincinnati 2006.
1“Sacred and Profane: The Sestina as Rite” by Marilyn Krysl, in The American Poetry Review Mar/Apr 2004.
by D. Marbach
The sestina is a poetic form with a long history. It was invented in the twelfth century by Arnaut Daniel, a poet and mathematician in
medieval southern France. The form is complicated, repetitive, sometimes obsessive. It has been described as a reverie, a folding flame,
a braid, and a squared circle. If it is so complicated, why would anyone want to write one of these poems? Why would anyone bother
to read one? Because, in the sestina form, the poet and the reader can share the magical experience of a moment in the eternal –
the simultaneously linear and circular nature of time.
The standard sestina form is 39 lines. Each line is the same length in syllables or meter. The lines are arranged is seven stanzas. There
are 6 six-line stanzas and 1 three-line stanza. The six-line stanza is called a sestet, and the three-line stanza is called the envoy. The
last word of each line is called an end-word or teleuton. The six teleutons of the first sestet recur as the end-words of the other
sestets, but in a changing order. No sestets have the same order. The envoy uses all of the six teleutons, three of them as end-words
and three within its lines, in any order. If we number each teleuton in the first stanza, the standard mix-up order for changing the
end-words throughout the poem is as follows:
First stanza: 123456
Second stanza: 615243
Third stanza: 364125
Fourth stanza: 532614
Fifth stanza: 451362
Sixth stanza: 246531
Envoy (example order): (2)5, (4)3, (6)1
Notice that the last number of each sestet becomes the first number of the next sestet (6-6, 3-3, 5-5, 4-4, 2-2), creating a flow pattern
between sestets and a close recurrence of that end-word.
Many medieval Europeans saw earthly time as linear and advancing toward death, while they imagined heavenly time as perfect and
eternal like a circle. It is the “chiming” nature of the teleutons at the end of the measured lines that mimics the linear and circular
nature of time. Imagine an old clock. It chimes each new hour today, in a linear order: 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock, and so on. It chimed
those same numbered hours yesterday. But today the sounding of the hour may mean something new to you when you hear it.
Similarly, each recurrence of the teleuton adds a new meaning within the context of the current sestet, and simultaneously echoes its
former meaning from the previous sestets. The poem marches forward in time, while also circling back around.
The envoy of the sestina is a conclusion or summary. The six teleutons “gather on stage to take that final bow—as though saying this is
about to be over—but you won't be the same now… It puts an end to the cyclic character of the six [sestets] and opens the door back
into quotidian time.”1 The envoy may be arranged by the poet so that the teleutons are in their original order in its three lines—(1)2, (3)
4, (5)6—to emphasize the return to normal daily time.
After its invention by Daniel, the sestina form became popular with troubadours, who enjoyed composing complicated poetry.
Eventually, sestinas were being written in Italy by accomplished poets such as Petrarch and Dante. The form received the name
“sestina” from the Italian language because of its use of the number six. The form continued spreading throughout medieval Europe
and into England. The first known English sestina is Philip Sidney’s “Yee Gote-heard Gods” (You Goat-Herd Gods) in his 1590 Arcadia.
The first sestet is:
You goatherd gods, that love the grassy mountains,
You nymphs which haunt the springs in pleasant valleys,
You satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
Which to my woes gives still an early morning,
And draws the dolor on till weary evening.
The lines of the standard sestina were all the same length or meter. Historically, in French they were alexandrines (12 syllables). The
Italians used hendecasyllabic lines (11 syllables). In English the lines were usually decasyllabic (10 syllables) or the popular iambic
pentameter (10 syllables with the unaccented and accented syllables occurring as ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM). Sydney’s
Goat-Herd sestina has lines of 11 syllables that are iambic pentameter with an extra syllable at the end.
Pontus de Tyard introduced a rhymed version of the sestina in France in the sixteenth century, using the rhyme scheme abcbca in the
first stanza. But early English sestinas were usually not rhymed. Later, in the nineteenth century, the English rhyming sestina was
popularized by Algernon Charles Swinburne. He used a variety of schemes to achieve rhyme. One scheme rhymed the first sestet
ababab and then used a mix-up pattern for each of the other sestets that alternated odd- and even-numbered teleutons, so all the
sestets rhymed ababab. His mix-up pattern still maintained the traditional flow between sestets (6-6, 3-3, 5-5, 4-4, 2-2). An example is
Swinburne’s “Sestina”:
I saw my soul at rest upon a day
As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,
Among soft leaves that give the starlight way
To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;
So that it knew as one in visions may,
And knew not as men waking, of delight.
Other schemes to achieve rhyme in English sestinas have been used, including Tyard’s abcbca scheme. The mix-up pattern of rhyming
sestinas may be altered to prevent couplets within a sestet. In English sestinas, couplets (two lines rhyming in succession) are often
avoided, since couplets create a sense of comfortable finality or conclusion, which is not usually wanted in the sestina form.
English poets have doubled the sestina in several ways. Sidney’s “Yee Gote-heard Gods” is a double sestina of twelve six-line stanzas.
Swinburne crafted “The Complaint of Lisa” in twelve twelve-line stanzas, and he also rhymed it! This is the first stanza with twelve
teleutons:
There is no woman living that draws breath
So sad as I, though all things sadden her.
There is not one upon life's weariest way
Who is weary as I am weary of all but death.
Toward whom I look as looks the sunflower
All day with all his whole soul toward the sun;
While in the sun's sight I make moan all day,
And all night on my sleepless maiden bed
Weep and call out on death, O Love, and thee,
That thou or he would take me to the dead,
And know not what thing evil I have done
That life should lay such heavy hand on me.
Should today’s poet use the historic sestina form? Can modern poetry be written in such an old-fashioned way? Modern writers have
composed some of their most beautiful poems in the sestina form. They have kept the basic strengths of the standard sestina form
while creating interesting variations that are very effective for conveying the poet’s message to the reader.
Modern writers are inventive with varying the teleutons to keep the end-words from becoming too repetitive, too distracting from the
poet’s intended message. An historic technique for breaking the repetitive effect of a teleuton is to use an identically-spelled word.
This can include either a homograph or a homonym. A homograph is an identically-spelled word with a different sound and meaning,
such as the noun “wind” (air that is blowing) and the verb “wind” (to turn a clock). A homonym is an identically-spelled word with the
same sound but a different meaning, such as the noun “rose” ( a flower) and the verb “rose” (to have risen up) in J. E. Ball’s “A Sestina
of Memories”. A modern technique is to use homophones, words that may be spelled differently but sound identical, such as “to” and
“two”. Modern writers also use different words that begin or end with a similar sound, such as “light”, “delight”, and “lightning”.
Variation in end-words is best done for a purpose, and done sparingly, so that the chiming effect of recurring teleutons is not lost for
the reader. An example is Anthony Hecht’s sestina “The Book of Yolek” about a little boy in Germany, which begins:
The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.
Hecht varied the teleuton “to” later as “too”, “tattoo” and “1942”. These end-words sound alike to the reader, and the variations allow
him to introduce important events for the reader. Hecht did not vary the other five teleutons (meal, walk, home, camp, day). As the
poem unfolds, the change in meaning of these five simple end-words as they chime in the context of each new sestet produces a
dramatic and haunting effect.
The tradition of measured line length is often abandoned by modern writers. The danger is that end-words in unmeasured lines may
lose their chiming value. However, varying the line length skillfully can enhance the sestina while maintaining the chiming, especially
with unusual or powerful end-words such as “zephyr” or “clash”. For example, Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” has lines that run in
varying syllabic length and irregular rhythm. The poem is a dramatic monologue crafted to sound like the informal speech of an angry
man, as in the third sestet:
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour's stour than a year's peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there's no wine like the blood's crimson!
Another creative modern line-length variation with a purpose is the “diminishing sestina”, whose lines become shorter until only the
teleutons remain. Examples include Miller Williams’ “The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina” and Alan Ansen’s “A Fit of Something Against
Something”. Williams’ diminishing sestina starts with long, slow lines in the first sestet, and each sestet’s lines are progressively shorter
and faster as the poet’s message becomes more urgent about his children leaving home and his wanting to see them, until the sixth
stanza has only the teleutons:
Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.
His envoy returns to long lines, in an apology for the blurting urgency of that short sestet.
Ansen’s sestina progresses through a history of the sestina form, lamenting its change. The first sestet has overly-long lines about the
sestina’s glorious origins, and each subsequent sestet has shorter lines about literary periods, until the poem reaches the envoy
composed only of the six teleutons as a modern poet declares:
Sestina order,
Austere master,
BE GONE!!
Some modern poets, in troubadour fashion, have made their sestina form more difficult by adding rules and restrictions. Jonah Winter
composed a sestina with the same end-word “Bob” for every line, in “Sestina: Bob” about a man’s obsession with his ex-girlfriend’s new
boyfriend. Wesli Court used all six teleutons in the first line of each of the stanzas in his sestina “The Obsession” about a recurring
dream.
Other modern poets have composed shorter sestina-like poems, achieving the effect of the sestina without its length. An example is
Helen Frost’s “Grandma Keeps Forgetting”, a “tritina”. These shorter poems should include end-words in stanzas, a changing mix-up
pattern for the order of the end-words, flow pattern from stanza to stanza, and an envoy composed of all the teleutons. The
“quatrina” has four 4-line stanzas (quatrains) and a 2-line envoy. All four teleutons are used in the envoy, two of them as its end-
words. There are several possible mix-up orders for the quatrains, including: 1234, 4123, 3412, 2341, envoy. The “tritina” has three 3-
line stanzas (tercets) and a one-line envoy. The three teleutons occur in the envoy, one of them as its end-word. A possible mix-up
order is: 123, 312, 231, envoy.
How can you write a sestina? Here are some tips for making the process easier:
Start by attempting a shorter form, like the tritina.
Pick a topic, theme, or subject. Perhaps you want to tell a little story in your poem. Perhaps you want to examine the changing
nature of something.
Choose the teleutons. The teleutons should support the topic you picked. Some writers recommend nouns. These can be concrete
nouns (table, girl), abstract nouns (sadness, grace), pronouns (she, it), and proper nouns (Sally, New York). You may want to try a verb
(run), preposition (by), or adjective (red) instead. The end-words are going to be repeated, so you can use that repetition to create
an effect. Choose a word that is simple in meaning (forest) if you want the word to chime the same for the reader throughout the
poem. Or, choose a word that is rich in meanings (break) if you want to change the meaning for the reader as the poem unfolds. To
find out whether a word has one meaning or several different meanings in the English language, you can use your dictionary. You may
want to explore the change in a loaded teleuton like “father” in a story-poem. Do you want the end-word to blend into the
background of the poem (me, to), or do you want it to be obvious (rhinoceros)? To create tension in the poem, choose a couple of
end-words that are opposites (light & dark, earth & heaven). The mood of a poem will be strengthened by choosing a teleuton that
chimes it (agony, joy). You can start with a list of more teleutons than are required, and then drop the ones that don’t work as you
write the poem.
Begin writing your stanzas. Some writers suggest that you start with the short envoy. This will give you a well-crafted conclusion to
your poem, and will help you make a final selection of the important teleutons. Try to make all the lines of your envoy measure the
same length in syllables or meter. Suzanne, link this to our website’s Resources new article on meter. Once you have established a
length and rhythm that works for you, it can be used for writing the rest of the poem.
As you start on the longer stanzas, carefully put the teleutons in the mix-up order required. An easy way to get the order is to use
Joshua Mandel’s “sestina generator” website, or Helen Frost’s “worksheets for forms” website.
When writing each line, you can draw attention to a teleuton by making it the end of the sentence as well as the end of the line. Or
you can soften the chiming of a teleuton by enjambing the line (carry the meaning over from that line to the next line). A technique
that will break the repetitive effect of a teleuton is to use a homonym or homograph.
Check the measure of each line after you finish the stanza. If a line in your stanza is longer or shorter in measure than the other lines,
and you didn’t do that for a purpose or effect, try to re-write that line.
Don’t be discouraged if your drafted sestina requires revising! You are composing a poem that is both linear and circular. Your reader
will be haunted and uplifted when you capture “a moment in the eternal”. Keep on writing!
References and Footnotes:
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton University Press, 1993.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco. University Press of New England, Hanover 2000.
“Obsession and the Sestina Form” by Margaret Spanos, in Bloom’s Major Poets: Dante
edited by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, Pennsylvania 2001.
Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms by William Baer. Writer’s Digest Books, Cincinnati 2006.
1“Sacred and Profane: The Sestina as Rite” by Marilyn Krysl, in The American Poetry Review Mar/Apr 2004.
The Versatile Stanza
by D. Marbach
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms.
--John Donne “The Canonization”
The word stanza is Italian for “a place to stand; a room.” In poetry, a stanza is a grouping of lines acting together, usually with a
specific pattern of rhyme and meter. Donne’s line about building pretty rooms is a reference to the organization of poetry into
stanzas.
Stanzas have been used throughout history in poetry of many languages, and modern poets still use these units in their writing. Why
has this organizational pattern been used by so many writers? Stanzas are versatile. They come in different sizes and shapes, just like
rooms do. These units of organization enable the writer to bring a musical quality to the poem with rhyme and meter patterns for the
ear of the reader. Stanzas are also a tool for dividing poetry into manageable pieces for the eye of the reader. Stanzas help the
audience to see, hear, understand, and remember the poem.
In discussions of the organization of poetry, stanzas are often categorized by the number of lines in them. The English system
commonly classifies stanzas as: couplet (2 lines); tercet (3 lines); quatrain (4 lines); quintet (5); sestet (6); septet (7); octave (8); nonet
(9); and quatorzain (14). Longer stanzas are usually described in English as “ten-line stanza” and so forth. Other terms can correctly
be used for the short stanzas (such as quintain or cinquain for 5 lines) because stanza terms have come to us from a variety of
European languages.
Stanzas are further categorized by the meter or rhythm of their lines. The metrical length of a line is the number of beats or
syllables. A stanza may be isometric, with lines of equal metrical length, or heterometric, using lines of different metrical lengths.
Although metrically equal lines may not be exactly equal visually when printed on the page, the isometric stanza will look fairly square
or rectangular on the page. An example is this stanza from W. E. Henley’s “Ballade of Dead Actors”, with equal iambic tetrameter
lines (8 syllables each):
The curtain falls, the play is played:
The Beggar packs beside the Beau;
The Monarch troops, and troops the Maid;
The Thunder huddles with the Snow.
Where are the revellers high and low?
The clashing swords? The lover's call?
The dancers gleaming row on row?
Into the night go one and all.
A heterometric stanza will look less rectangular on the page. John Hollander wrote this stanza about the heterometric stanza (shown
here in centered format to accentuate the differences in its line lengths):
A stanza in Italian means “a room”;
In verse, it needn’t keep to square
Corners, as of some dismal tomb,
But wanders anywhere:
Some stanzas can be built of many lines
Of differing length;
Their variation then combines
With rhymes to give it strength.
Along the way
Short lines can play,
And, at the end, a longer and more solemn
Line extends below, a broad base for a column.
Rhyme is often incorporated into English stanzaic poetry. Rhymes at the ends of the lines are called end-rhyme. The end-rhymes
help the audience to hear the end of the lines. A stanza in which all the lines end with the same sound is monorhymed. Actually,
most stanzas use a more complex pattern of two or more sounds for the end-words, and not all the lines have to rhyme with anything.
In describing the rhyme scheme (the pattern of end-rhymes) of a stanza or poem, the tradition is to use an algebraic notation. The
same beginning alphabetical letter (such as “a”) denotes each line with the same end-rhyme sound within the poem, and the last
letters (x,y,z) denote lines that don’t rhyme with anything. A rhymed couplet would be “aa”. A rhymed tercet might be aaa, aab,
abb, aba. A rhymed quatrain might be aabb, abab, abba, aaab, abbb, abca, xaya, axya, and so forth. The longer the stanza, the more
complex its rhyme scheme could be, and the greater the possible variations from which the poet may choose.
Different rhyme schemes create different effects for the audience to hear. The 14-line sonnet poetic form can illustrate the
numerous choices of rhyme schemes poets have historically found useful for building “pretty rooms” about the theme of love. The
sonnet form requires a turn (a change) in the theme during the poem. The stanza arrangement is important to the structuring of the
poem, a part of the creating and unfolding of the theme. The Petrarchan sonnet form from the Italian language can have the rhyme
scheme abbaabba-cdcdcd, usually arranged in two unequal stanzas of an octave and a sestet, with the turn occurring at line 9. The
French-language sonnet form puts a couplet at lines 9-10 in the rhyme scheme abbaabba-cc-dede, to emphasize the turn there. The
Shakespearean English sonnet has quatrains with alternating rhymes and a final couplet, abab-cdcd-efef-gg, giving the opportunity for a
turn between any of the quatrains or a turn at the final couplet.
Which type of sonnet rhyme scheme did Elizabeth Barrett Browning use in this famous poem? It is Sonnet LXIII from her Sonnets from
the Portuguese (1850):
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tear, of all my life! - and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
If you guessed Petrarchan, you were correct. Her poem also brings up the question of how to correctly display stanzaic poetry on a
page.
There are many acceptable choices in English for the visual display of stanzaic poetry. These choices will produce different effects
for the eye of your reader. The simplest choice (and the most conventional in modern times) is for all of the lines of the stanza to be
lined up so that they begin together on the page, at the left margin (or at the same tabbed indent from the left margin). Henley’s
isometric example stanza was displayed with all the lines at the left-margin tabbed.
A normal choice for displaying poetry in previous centuries was to visualize the rhyme scheme within each stanza by starting the lines
on the page depending on the rhymes. The first line (rhyming “a”) might be at the left-most point, and all other “a” lines in the stanza
would be at that same left point. The line with the next rhyme sound (“b”) might be indented one tab, as well as all the other lines
that rhyme with it. The lines with the next rhyme sound (“c”) would be indented one more tab. Here is an example of alignment by
rhyme, in a stanza from George Herbert’s “The Flower”:
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
Another traditional choice for displaying poetry has been to visualize the meter of the lines by starting the lines on the page
depending on their length. The long lines would be started at the left-most point, and the short lines would be indented by a tab.
To accentuate their brevity, very short lines may be started in the center of the length of the long lines. This example of alignment
by meter is a stanza from John Donne’s “Song”:
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
Finally, centering is a choice for displaying a poem. Each of the lines of the stanza is centered on the page. Hollander’s
heterometric stanza example above was displayed centered. Centering is an unusual choice, however, and is usually reserved for a
poem that was written with different line lengths purposefully to make a figure or visual effect of some kind. Centering can also be
used to fit the poem within a tight space of some kind (such as within an oval frame).
A poem with multiple stanzas is described as strophic. A strophic poem may be composed of any number of stanzas. There are many
traditional poetic forms which are strophic, with a specific number and type of stanzas required. Just as a house may have several
rooms with the same purpose and therefore the same shape and size (bedrooms), and other rooms with a different purpose and
therefore a different shape and size (kitchen), so a strophic poem may have regular stanzas that are all the same in structure (length,
meter, rhyme) because they have the same purpose, or a strophic poem may be irregular with stanzas that are different structures to
suit various purposes.
Narrative (story-telling) poems are often regular, composed of many stanzas of the same type. The stanzas break the long story of a
narrative into smaller units for the reader, making it easier to follow the events. Lyrical (musical) poems are often regular. In a lyrical
poem, the rhythm and rhyme of the stanza units resembles the organization of a song into verses and choruses.
An example of a regular strophic poetic form is the ballad, which is a simple type of narrative poem that is also lyrical. In fact, many
old ballads were originally folk songs. Ballads are often tragic in tone. Commonly, the stanzas of an English ballad are heterometric
quatrains. Each quatrain is separately rhymed xaya xbyb xcyc etc., with the two rhymed lines shorter than the two unrhymed lines.
The longer lines have four strong beats and the shorter lines have three beats and a silent pause. These are the first two stanzas from
a folk ballad “The Wife of Usher’s Well” (Number 79 in F. J. Child’s 1882-1898 collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads):
There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o’er the sea.
They had not been a week from her,
A week but barely one,
When word came to the carlin wife
That her three sons were gone.
Literary ballads are more carefully written than folk ballads, and have a known author, but their style imitates the old folk ballads. A
famous literary ballad is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.”
English-language poets have used and composed longer, more complicated stanzas than the quatrain for regular strophic poetry.
Ottava rima is a strophic form borrowed from medieval Italian poets, and is often used for long poems with a mixed theme (both serious
and comic) or a mixed mode (both narration and discourse). The octave stanzas have the rhyme scheme abababcc, with lines of 10 or
11 syllables. This is stanza XIX from Lord Byron’s story set in Venice, “Beppo”:
Didst ever see a Gondola? For fear
You should not, I'll describe it you exactly:
‘Tis a long cover'd boat that's common here,
Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly,
Row'd by two rowers, each call'd “Gondolier”,
It glides along the water looking blackly,
Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.
Geoffrey Chaucer standardized an isometric septet stanza in his Troilus and Criseyde. The Rhyme royal stanza has seven lines of 10
syllables and rhymes ababbcc, as in this Troilus excerpt:
Now here, now there, he hunted them so fast,
There was but Greeks' blood; and Troilus
Now him he hurt, now him adown he cast;
Ay where he went it was arrayed thus:
He was their death, and shield of life for us,
That as that day there durst him none withstand,
While that he held his bloody sword in hand.
Edmund Spenser created a heterometric nonet stanza with rhyme scheme ababbcbcc for his complex descriptive story The Faerie
Queene. The first eight lines of the Spenserian stanza are the same length (10 syllables) and the ninth line is longer (12 syllables).
John Keats used Spencerian stanzas to tell his magical romantic story “The Eve of St. Agnes”, which begins:
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
The Scottish stanza that Robert Burns’ popularized is a heterometric sestet rhyming aaabab. The a lines are the same metrical length,
while the b lines are half as long. The short lines are useful in poems that are serious, and poems that are funny, for an effect of
irony or closure. Here is a stanza used in Burns’ serious poem, “Elegy On Captain Matthew Henderson”:
Thou, Autumn, wi' thy yellow hair,
In grief thy sallow mantle tear!
Thou, Winter, hurling thro' the air
The roaring blast,
Wide o'er the naked world declare
The worth we've lost!
A regular strophic poem may have stanzas that are not separate units, but are linked units, in which the linking is achieved by
repetition. Chaining is the interlacing pattern of a repeated rhyme or word in strophic verse. Terza rima is a regular strophic poetic
form in which there are multiple tercets with a chaining rhyme pattern: aba bcb cdc ded and so on. This brief excerpt comes from
Lord Byron’s lengthy “The Prophecy of Dante”:
But the Sun, though not overcast, must set
And the night cometh; I am old in days,
And deeds, and contemplation, and have met
Destruction face to face in all his ways.
The World hath left me, what it found me, pure,
And if I have not gathered yet its praise,
I sought it not by any baser lure;
Man wrongs, and Time avenges, and my name
May form a monument not all obscure
Though such was not my Ambition’s end or aim….
Some strophic poems link stanzas by repeating an entire line. A repeated line is called a refrain. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening” links four stanzas with the chaining of rhyme scheme and refrain as aaba bbcb ccdc ddDD (where capital “D”
symbolizes the refrain). You can see and hear the linking repetition in his lovely isometric quatrains poem:
Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near,
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake,
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The stanzas of an irregular strophic poem do not have to be alike. They can have different structures. A poem may have, say, five
stanzas, and each of the stanzas could be different in length, meter, and rhyme.
The rondeau is a short poetic form that is irregular. The typical rondeau has 15 lines in three stanzas divided unequally, and uses two
rhyme sounds (“a” and “b”). The rhyming lines are all the same meter, but there are shorter refrain lines (“R”) composed of the first
few words of the first line of the poem. The rhyme scheme is aabba aabR aabbaR. A famous rondeau is
John McCrae’s 1915 wartime poem, "In Flanders Fields":
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The ode is a long strophic poem with the possibility of a variety of stanzas. Ancient Greek Pindaric odes had a celebratory purpose.
They were long poems in three sections, in which the first section and the second section had the same type of stanzaic arrangement
(so that they could be danced or sung to the same music), while the third section used a different type of stanzaic arrangement.
Ancient poets tried to be clever and original in composing their new ode with new types of stanzas in the three sections for each
new celebration. Nonce is the term for an original arrangement of poetic elements such as rhyme, meter, length, and repetition for a
specific poem.
Modern odes are still strophic, sometimes in three sections, and often original in stanzaic composition. Their purpose has become a
more personal meditation about one subject (such as a person, a piece of art, or an event). John Milton composed nonce stanzas for
the two strophic sections of his ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”. In the second section, each heterometric stanza has eight
lines and is rhymed aabccbdd. The syllabic lengths of the iambic rhythm lines are 6, 6, 10, 6, 6, 10, 8, 12 . Here is one of Milton’s ode
stanzas:
Ring out ye Crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears,
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
And let the Base of Heav'ns deep Organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th' Angelike symphony.
The end of a line of poetry is often the end of a phrase or sentence. This type of line is called end-stopped. However, the end of a
line does not have to be the end of a sentence. Running a thought over from one line to the next is called enjambment. Enjambment
of lines is common in English poetry. “Heroic couplets” are a traditional strophic poetic form in which the thought in the first line
runs over into the second line of every couplet and stops; the couplets are sentences. This excerpt, about the Thames River, from
John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill is a good example of using heroic couplets:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.
The sentences in longer types of stanzas can run through any number of lines in the stanza. However, the sentences rarely run over
from one stanza into the next stanza. This is an important principle in English strophic poetry: the end of a stanza is almost always
the end of a sentence, or at least the end of a phrase. The stanzas are separate units of thought. If a thought runs over into the
next stanza without any punctuation, the poet is doing it for some unusual effect upon the reader.
How can you write stanzaic poetry? There are two basic methods. The first way is to draft your poem in lines without any stanza
breaks, and then figure out where the thoughts might most comfortably break the poem into stanzaic units. You might find that your
lines break nicely into equal stanzas, such as isometric quatrains rhymed abab. Or you may see a more complicated pattern emerge,
such as alternating stanzas of quatrains and couplets. Maybe your thoughts break nicely into two heterometric sestets with lines in 8-
6-8-6-8-10 syllables. After you find an overall pattern, re-write the lines which didn’t follow the pattern so that the meter, rhyme,
and sentences of all the lines fit your stanza pattern.
The second way is to draft your poem using a stanzaic structure to begin with, letting the stanzas help shape what you write. For this
method, choose a stanzaic structure based on three considerations: the complexity of your thoughts and descriptions, the tone of
your poem, and the stanzaic structure of historically similar poems. Most sentences can be expressed within a quatrain of four
average-length lines (8 to 10 syllables). The more complicated your thoughts, the more complex (and long) your sentences will be, and
therefore a longer stanza would be a better choice. Line length is also an important factor for complexity of thoughts, and for tone.
Longer stanzas and lines will allow you to put more sentences and longer sentences within the stanza, running a sentence over from
line to line sometimes, and stopping a sentence at the end of the line other times, for different effects within the stanza. Longer
lines make a poem sound more serious. On the other hand, if you want to write a poem with a humorous tone, couplets of short lines
are fine.
Poets have historically used particular stanzaic structures for particular types of poems because those structures worked well. Do
you want to weave rhyme sounds, or repeat a thought in your poem? Try a form with linking or refrains, such as terza rima or the
rondeau. Want to write a tragedy? You could use the historic ballad’s quatrain stanzas, with one piece of the story per stanza. Want
to meditate on a piece of art or music? Be creative with irregular stanzas in an ode. Are you in love with someone to whom you want
to express your emotion and devotion? The “pretty rooms” of the sonnet were designed for this purpose. Considering a chronicle of
the Napoleonic wars? You can compose the poem in Rhyme royal.
Learning how to write in a variety of stanzaic arrangements will help you express your thoughts and convey your message. Your
readers may not understand the time, effort, and skill behind the organization of the lines of your poem, but the versatile stanza will
make your poetry easier to read, more beautiful to the eye and ear of your readers, and more memorable. Keep on writing!
References:
The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms edited by Ron Padgett. T&W Books, New York 2000.
Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse by John Hollander. Yale University Press, New Haven 2001.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton University Press, 1993.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco. University Press of New England, Hanover 2000.
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification by Timothy Steele. Ohio University Press, Athens 1999.
by D. Marbach
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms.
--John Donne “The Canonization”
The word stanza is Italian for “a place to stand; a room.” In poetry, a stanza is a grouping of lines acting together, usually with a
specific pattern of rhyme and meter. Donne’s line about building pretty rooms is a reference to the organization of poetry into
stanzas.
Stanzas have been used throughout history in poetry of many languages, and modern poets still use these units in their writing. Why
has this organizational pattern been used by so many writers? Stanzas are versatile. They come in different sizes and shapes, just like
rooms do. These units of organization enable the writer to bring a musical quality to the poem with rhyme and meter patterns for the
ear of the reader. Stanzas are also a tool for dividing poetry into manageable pieces for the eye of the reader. Stanzas help the
audience to see, hear, understand, and remember the poem.
In discussions of the organization of poetry, stanzas are often categorized by the number of lines in them. The English system
commonly classifies stanzas as: couplet (2 lines); tercet (3 lines); quatrain (4 lines); quintet (5); sestet (6); septet (7); octave (8); nonet
(9); and quatorzain (14). Longer stanzas are usually described in English as “ten-line stanza” and so forth. Other terms can correctly
be used for the short stanzas (such as quintain or cinquain for 5 lines) because stanza terms have come to us from a variety of
European languages.
Stanzas are further categorized by the meter or rhythm of their lines. The metrical length of a line is the number of beats or
syllables. A stanza may be isometric, with lines of equal metrical length, or heterometric, using lines of different metrical lengths.
Although metrically equal lines may not be exactly equal visually when printed on the page, the isometric stanza will look fairly square
or rectangular on the page. An example is this stanza from W. E. Henley’s “Ballade of Dead Actors”, with equal iambic tetrameter
lines (8 syllables each):
The curtain falls, the play is played:
The Beggar packs beside the Beau;
The Monarch troops, and troops the Maid;
The Thunder huddles with the Snow.
Where are the revellers high and low?
The clashing swords? The lover's call?
The dancers gleaming row on row?
Into the night go one and all.
A heterometric stanza will look less rectangular on the page. John Hollander wrote this stanza about the heterometric stanza (shown
here in centered format to accentuate the differences in its line lengths):
A stanza in Italian means “a room”;
In verse, it needn’t keep to square
Corners, as of some dismal tomb,
But wanders anywhere:
Some stanzas can be built of many lines
Of differing length;
Their variation then combines
With rhymes to give it strength.
Along the way
Short lines can play,
And, at the end, a longer and more solemn
Line extends below, a broad base for a column.
Rhyme is often incorporated into English stanzaic poetry. Rhymes at the ends of the lines are called end-rhyme. The end-rhymes
help the audience to hear the end of the lines. A stanza in which all the lines end with the same sound is monorhymed. Actually,
most stanzas use a more complex pattern of two or more sounds for the end-words, and not all the lines have to rhyme with anything.
In describing the rhyme scheme (the pattern of end-rhymes) of a stanza or poem, the tradition is to use an algebraic notation. The
same beginning alphabetical letter (such as “a”) denotes each line with the same end-rhyme sound within the poem, and the last
letters (x,y,z) denote lines that don’t rhyme with anything. A rhymed couplet would be “aa”. A rhymed tercet might be aaa, aab,
abb, aba. A rhymed quatrain might be aabb, abab, abba, aaab, abbb, abca, xaya, axya, and so forth. The longer the stanza, the more
complex its rhyme scheme could be, and the greater the possible variations from which the poet may choose.
Different rhyme schemes create different effects for the audience to hear. The 14-line sonnet poetic form can illustrate the
numerous choices of rhyme schemes poets have historically found useful for building “pretty rooms” about the theme of love. The
sonnet form requires a turn (a change) in the theme during the poem. The stanza arrangement is important to the structuring of the
poem, a part of the creating and unfolding of the theme. The Petrarchan sonnet form from the Italian language can have the rhyme
scheme abbaabba-cdcdcd, usually arranged in two unequal stanzas of an octave and a sestet, with the turn occurring at line 9. The
French-language sonnet form puts a couplet at lines 9-10 in the rhyme scheme abbaabba-cc-dede, to emphasize the turn there. The
Shakespearean English sonnet has quatrains with alternating rhymes and a final couplet, abab-cdcd-efef-gg, giving the opportunity for a
turn between any of the quatrains or a turn at the final couplet.
Which type of sonnet rhyme scheme did Elizabeth Barrett Browning use in this famous poem? It is Sonnet LXIII from her Sonnets from
the Portuguese (1850):
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tear, of all my life! - and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
If you guessed Petrarchan, you were correct. Her poem also brings up the question of how to correctly display stanzaic poetry on a
page.
There are many acceptable choices in English for the visual display of stanzaic poetry. These choices will produce different effects
for the eye of your reader. The simplest choice (and the most conventional in modern times) is for all of the lines of the stanza to be
lined up so that they begin together on the page, at the left margin (or at the same tabbed indent from the left margin). Henley’s
isometric example stanza was displayed with all the lines at the left-margin tabbed.
A normal choice for displaying poetry in previous centuries was to visualize the rhyme scheme within each stanza by starting the lines
on the page depending on the rhymes. The first line (rhyming “a”) might be at the left-most point, and all other “a” lines in the stanza
would be at that same left point. The line with the next rhyme sound (“b”) might be indented one tab, as well as all the other lines
that rhyme with it. The lines with the next rhyme sound (“c”) would be indented one more tab. Here is an example of alignment by
rhyme, in a stanza from George Herbert’s “The Flower”:
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
Another traditional choice for displaying poetry has been to visualize the meter of the lines by starting the lines on the page
depending on their length. The long lines would be started at the left-most point, and the short lines would be indented by a tab.
To accentuate their brevity, very short lines may be started in the center of the length of the long lines. This example of alignment
by meter is a stanza from John Donne’s “Song”:
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
Finally, centering is a choice for displaying a poem. Each of the lines of the stanza is centered on the page. Hollander’s
heterometric stanza example above was displayed centered. Centering is an unusual choice, however, and is usually reserved for a
poem that was written with different line lengths purposefully to make a figure or visual effect of some kind. Centering can also be
used to fit the poem within a tight space of some kind (such as within an oval frame).
A poem with multiple stanzas is described as strophic. A strophic poem may be composed of any number of stanzas. There are many
traditional poetic forms which are strophic, with a specific number and type of stanzas required. Just as a house may have several
rooms with the same purpose and therefore the same shape and size (bedrooms), and other rooms with a different purpose and
therefore a different shape and size (kitchen), so a strophic poem may have regular stanzas that are all the same in structure (length,
meter, rhyme) because they have the same purpose, or a strophic poem may be irregular with stanzas that are different structures to
suit various purposes.
Narrative (story-telling) poems are often regular, composed of many stanzas of the same type. The stanzas break the long story of a
narrative into smaller units for the reader, making it easier to follow the events. Lyrical (musical) poems are often regular. In a lyrical
poem, the rhythm and rhyme of the stanza units resembles the organization of a song into verses and choruses.
An example of a regular strophic poetic form is the ballad, which is a simple type of narrative poem that is also lyrical. In fact, many
old ballads were originally folk songs. Ballads are often tragic in tone. Commonly, the stanzas of an English ballad are heterometric
quatrains. Each quatrain is separately rhymed xaya xbyb xcyc etc., with the two rhymed lines shorter than the two unrhymed lines.
The longer lines have four strong beats and the shorter lines have three beats and a silent pause. These are the first two stanzas from
a folk ballad “The Wife of Usher’s Well” (Number 79 in F. J. Child’s 1882-1898 collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads):
There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o’er the sea.
They had not been a week from her,
A week but barely one,
When word came to the carlin wife
That her three sons were gone.
Literary ballads are more carefully written than folk ballads, and have a known author, but their style imitates the old folk ballads. A
famous literary ballad is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.”
English-language poets have used and composed longer, more complicated stanzas than the quatrain for regular strophic poetry.
Ottava rima is a strophic form borrowed from medieval Italian poets, and is often used for long poems with a mixed theme (both serious
and comic) or a mixed mode (both narration and discourse). The octave stanzas have the rhyme scheme abababcc, with lines of 10 or
11 syllables. This is stanza XIX from Lord Byron’s story set in Venice, “Beppo”:
Didst ever see a Gondola? For fear
You should not, I'll describe it you exactly:
‘Tis a long cover'd boat that's common here,
Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly,
Row'd by two rowers, each call'd “Gondolier”,
It glides along the water looking blackly,
Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.
Geoffrey Chaucer standardized an isometric septet stanza in his Troilus and Criseyde. The Rhyme royal stanza has seven lines of 10
syllables and rhymes ababbcc, as in this Troilus excerpt:
Now here, now there, he hunted them so fast,
There was but Greeks' blood; and Troilus
Now him he hurt, now him adown he cast;
Ay where he went it was arrayed thus:
He was their death, and shield of life for us,
That as that day there durst him none withstand,
While that he held his bloody sword in hand.
Edmund Spenser created a heterometric nonet stanza with rhyme scheme ababbcbcc for his complex descriptive story The Faerie
Queene. The first eight lines of the Spenserian stanza are the same length (10 syllables) and the ninth line is longer (12 syllables).
John Keats used Spencerian stanzas to tell his magical romantic story “The Eve of St. Agnes”, which begins:
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
The Scottish stanza that Robert Burns’ popularized is a heterometric sestet rhyming aaabab. The a lines are the same metrical length,
while the b lines are half as long. The short lines are useful in poems that are serious, and poems that are funny, for an effect of
irony or closure. Here is a stanza used in Burns’ serious poem, “Elegy On Captain Matthew Henderson”:
Thou, Autumn, wi' thy yellow hair,
In grief thy sallow mantle tear!
Thou, Winter, hurling thro' the air
The roaring blast,
Wide o'er the naked world declare
The worth we've lost!
A regular strophic poem may have stanzas that are not separate units, but are linked units, in which the linking is achieved by
repetition. Chaining is the interlacing pattern of a repeated rhyme or word in strophic verse. Terza rima is a regular strophic poetic
form in which there are multiple tercets with a chaining rhyme pattern: aba bcb cdc ded and so on. This brief excerpt comes from
Lord Byron’s lengthy “The Prophecy of Dante”:
But the Sun, though not overcast, must set
And the night cometh; I am old in days,
And deeds, and contemplation, and have met
Destruction face to face in all his ways.
The World hath left me, what it found me, pure,
And if I have not gathered yet its praise,
I sought it not by any baser lure;
Man wrongs, and Time avenges, and my name
May form a monument not all obscure
Though such was not my Ambition’s end or aim….
Some strophic poems link stanzas by repeating an entire line. A repeated line is called a refrain. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening” links four stanzas with the chaining of rhyme scheme and refrain as aaba bbcb ccdc ddDD (where capital “D”
symbolizes the refrain). You can see and hear the linking repetition in his lovely isometric quatrains poem:
Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near,
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake,
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The stanzas of an irregular strophic poem do not have to be alike. They can have different structures. A poem may have, say, five
stanzas, and each of the stanzas could be different in length, meter, and rhyme.
The rondeau is a short poetic form that is irregular. The typical rondeau has 15 lines in three stanzas divided unequally, and uses two
rhyme sounds (“a” and “b”). The rhyming lines are all the same meter, but there are shorter refrain lines (“R”) composed of the first
few words of the first line of the poem. The rhyme scheme is aabba aabR aabbaR. A famous rondeau is
John McCrae’s 1915 wartime poem, "In Flanders Fields":
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The ode is a long strophic poem with the possibility of a variety of stanzas. Ancient Greek Pindaric odes had a celebratory purpose.
They were long poems in three sections, in which the first section and the second section had the same type of stanzaic arrangement
(so that they could be danced or sung to the same music), while the third section used a different type of stanzaic arrangement.
Ancient poets tried to be clever and original in composing their new ode with new types of stanzas in the three sections for each
new celebration. Nonce is the term for an original arrangement of poetic elements such as rhyme, meter, length, and repetition for a
specific poem.
Modern odes are still strophic, sometimes in three sections, and often original in stanzaic composition. Their purpose has become a
more personal meditation about one subject (such as a person, a piece of art, or an event). John Milton composed nonce stanzas for
the two strophic sections of his ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”. In the second section, each heterometric stanza has eight
lines and is rhymed aabccbdd. The syllabic lengths of the iambic rhythm lines are 6, 6, 10, 6, 6, 10, 8, 12 . Here is one of Milton’s ode
stanzas:
Ring out ye Crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears,
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
And let the Base of Heav'ns deep Organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th' Angelike symphony.
The end of a line of poetry is often the end of a phrase or sentence. This type of line is called end-stopped. However, the end of a
line does not have to be the end of a sentence. Running a thought over from one line to the next is called enjambment. Enjambment
of lines is common in English poetry. “Heroic couplets” are a traditional strophic poetic form in which the thought in the first line
runs over into the second line of every couplet and stops; the couplets are sentences. This excerpt, about the Thames River, from
John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill is a good example of using heroic couplets:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.
The sentences in longer types of stanzas can run through any number of lines in the stanza. However, the sentences rarely run over
from one stanza into the next stanza. This is an important principle in English strophic poetry: the end of a stanza is almost always
the end of a sentence, or at least the end of a phrase. The stanzas are separate units of thought. If a thought runs over into the
next stanza without any punctuation, the poet is doing it for some unusual effect upon the reader.
How can you write stanzaic poetry? There are two basic methods. The first way is to draft your poem in lines without any stanza
breaks, and then figure out where the thoughts might most comfortably break the poem into stanzaic units. You might find that your
lines break nicely into equal stanzas, such as isometric quatrains rhymed abab. Or you may see a more complicated pattern emerge,
such as alternating stanzas of quatrains and couplets. Maybe your thoughts break nicely into two heterometric sestets with lines in 8-
6-8-6-8-10 syllables. After you find an overall pattern, re-write the lines which didn’t follow the pattern so that the meter, rhyme,
and sentences of all the lines fit your stanza pattern.
The second way is to draft your poem using a stanzaic structure to begin with, letting the stanzas help shape what you write. For this
method, choose a stanzaic structure based on three considerations: the complexity of your thoughts and descriptions, the tone of
your poem, and the stanzaic structure of historically similar poems. Most sentences can be expressed within a quatrain of four
average-length lines (8 to 10 syllables). The more complicated your thoughts, the more complex (and long) your sentences will be, and
therefore a longer stanza would be a better choice. Line length is also an important factor for complexity of thoughts, and for tone.
Longer stanzas and lines will allow you to put more sentences and longer sentences within the stanza, running a sentence over from
line to line sometimes, and stopping a sentence at the end of the line other times, for different effects within the stanza. Longer
lines make a poem sound more serious. On the other hand, if you want to write a poem with a humorous tone, couplets of short lines
are fine.
Poets have historically used particular stanzaic structures for particular types of poems because those structures worked well. Do
you want to weave rhyme sounds, or repeat a thought in your poem? Try a form with linking or refrains, such as terza rima or the
rondeau. Want to write a tragedy? You could use the historic ballad’s quatrain stanzas, with one piece of the story per stanza. Want
to meditate on a piece of art or music? Be creative with irregular stanzas in an ode. Are you in love with someone to whom you want
to express your emotion and devotion? The “pretty rooms” of the sonnet were designed for this purpose. Considering a chronicle of
the Napoleonic wars? You can compose the poem in Rhyme royal.
Learning how to write in a variety of stanzaic arrangements will help you express your thoughts and convey your message. Your
readers may not understand the time, effort, and skill behind the organization of the lines of your poem, but the versatile stanza will
make your poetry easier to read, more beautiful to the eye and ear of your readers, and more memorable. Keep on writing!
References:
The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms edited by Ron Padgett. T&W Books, New York 2000.
Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse by John Hollander. Yale University Press, New Haven 2001.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton University Press, 1993.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco. University Press of New England, Hanover 2000.
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification by Timothy Steele. Ohio University Press, Athens 1999.
The Villanelle and Variants: An Overview
By Bryan Bridges
(writerbryanb@yahoo.com)
EARLY HISTORY OF THE VILLANELLE
While popular belief states that the modern villanelle form is a well-established sixteenth century French traditional form – that is not
the fact.
In the Middle Ages, most people lived and worked on farms. They were uneducated and had little disposable income to spend on
entertainment. For those reasons they developed a rich culture of folk music, both instrumental and vocal, as well as dance and
story-telling. In Latin, farms were called villas and the farm workers were called villanos. This was the origin of the name “villanelle”
which originally meant a French rustic folk dance with accompanying song.
In the sixteenth century, the French used the term for any number of pastoral songs. These songs took a wide variety of forms. In
1574, Jean Passerat (1534-1602) wrote a nineteen-line poem that was named by its first line: J'ai perdu ma tourterelle (I have lost my
turtledove). This nonce (unique for one occasion) poem was the only one that Passerat wrote in the form that we now call a
villanelle. There is no reliable scholarship that has shown that any other French poet of the era wrote in the form, although many
wrote pastoral poems in various other forms. [1]
In 1844 Wilhelm Ténint published a handbook of poetics Prosodie de l’école moderne (Prosody of the Modern School) that claimed
the villanelle (of the Passerat turtledove form) was a well-established French Renaissance form. Using that erroneous source,
Théodore de Banville, who became the leading force in making the Passerat villanelle popular in nineteenth century France, claimed
it was an established ancient French form.[1]
THE VILLANELLE IN ENGLISH
While there is evidence of only one villanelle (in the form used today) in Renaissance France, the form came into its own in Victorian
England. Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), led by Banville, brought the form to England when he published his essay: A Plea for Certain
Exotic Forms of Verse (in Cornhill Magazine 36, 1877). With the early encouragement of Gosse, many British poets took up the form.
Some of the earliest English villanelles were from Gosse, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), and Henry
Austin Dobson (1840-1921.)
The villanelle was not well received in all quarters at the time. As the villanelle was coming into its own, so was the modernist
movement. The modernists brought about a move away from form toward free verse. An early modernist James Joyce (1882-1941)
wrote, through his alter ego Stephen Dedalus, a villanelle for the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), most likely to
emphasize that Dedalus was in an early stage of his literary evolution.
In the 1930s, the villanelle enjoyed a rebirth when poets such as W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) followed
William Empson (1906-1984) into a revival of the villanelle. It was Thomas who wrote what is arguably the archetypical villanelle: Do not
go gentle into that good night (1951). The post-war poets were followed by notable poets of the 1950s and 1960s writing villanelles.
Poets like Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) wrote villanelles. It is Bishop who is
credited with writing perhaps the best example of an American villanelle when she wrote One Art in 1976.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century there was a new formalist movement and the villanelle enjoyed a resurgence.
Poets such as Seamus Heaney, David Shapiro, John M. Ford, and Paul Muldoon have written villanelles more recently.
THE VILLANELLE FORM
The villanelle form has five tercets (three-line stanzas)and a concluding quatrain (four-line stanza) for a total of nineteen lines. The
meter (the number of syllables and rhythmic beats per line) may vary from poem to poem, but all of the lines within a villanelle should
be the same metrical length.
There are only two rhyme sounds used at the ends of the lines, which can be denoted [a] and [b]. Essentially, the tercets rhyme
scheme is a-b-a.
There are two refrains (lines repeated later). Line one of the poem can be denoted refrain [A] and line three is refrain [A’]. The
refrains alternate as the last line of the other tercets.
In the quatrain, line one rhymes [a], line two rhymes [b], and lines three and four are the refrains. In some cases it is better to
reverse the refrains in the quatrain and this is an acceptable practice leading to two forms of the “classic” villanelle. This is one way
to graphically depict the rhyme/refrain scheme of the villanelle form:
AbA’ abA abA’ abA abA’ abAA’ or abA’A
Villanelles can have any theme, and can be serious or humorous. Here is an example of the villanelle form:
The House On The Hill
By Edwin Arlington Robinson
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
From: The Children of the Night (1897)
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE REFRAIN
When he was asked what he does as he prepares to write a villanelle, the poet Lewis Turco answered, “You need a good refrain line
to begin; preferably a couple of them.” [2]
It can not be stressed enough that the success of the villanelle rests on the two refrains. This is true of any form that uses refrains.
In the villanelle, there are nineteen lines total. Ten of those lines are the refrains. That only leaves nine lines that are not
repeated. Twenty-six percent of a villanelle is the first refrain. Another twenty-six percent is the second refrain. Only forty-eight
percent of the total poem is composed of lines that are not repeated. In another French form, the triolet, that also has two refrains
totaling five lines, there are only eight lines in the entire poem. The refrain is crucial in the poetic forms that use them.
BEYOND THE VILLANELLE: VARIATIONS
There are many variations that have been created from the original villanelle form. One of the most popular changes to the villanelle
is to modify some or all the refrain lines so that they have slight differences but maintain both the meaning and, at the very least, the
last word. This technique was employed often by American poets of the post WWII years. A prime example of this technique is
Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art. One Art keeps the first refrain unmodified throughout the poem except for a slight variation in the
ending quatrain. However, the second refrain is modified throughout the poem as shown below:
From One Art: [3]
L3 to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
L9 to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
L15 I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
L19 though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
As you can see, Bishop does not use the same refrain for the entire poem. She does maintain the meter and the last word.
There are also longer villanelle poems with additional middle tercets, and shorter villanelles which take out one or two of the middle
tercets. An example of such variations is John Payne’s long “Villanelle: The air is white with snow-flakes clinging” (first published in
New Poems 1880), which has eight tercets before the final quatrain.
In addition to making differences within the basic form, the villanelle has also been combined with other forms to create completely
new forms. The most famous combination form was developed in the mid-1960s by Lewis Turco who took the villanelle and an Italian
form called the terza rima and combined them into a completely new form with elements of both called the terzanelle.
The terza rima has an undetermined number of tercets with a concluding couplet. The tercets interlock because the middle line of
a tercet sets the rhyme for the first and last lines of the next tercet. In a true terza rima, the meter is usually iambic pentameter
(line of 10 syllables with iambic rhythm “ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM”). Iambic tetrameter is also common (8 syllables per
line with rhythm “ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM”).
The terzanelle form is fixed at nineteen lines using the villanelle pattern of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. From the terza
rima, the form borrows the way the stanzas interlock, with the second line of a stanza becoming the third line of the next stanza as a
refrain. Like the villanelle, the quatrain has an optional line arrangement. The terzanelle can be represented like this:
ABA' bCB cDC dED eFE fAFA' or fFAA’
All of the capital letters are refrains. All of the same letters rhyme. [A] and [A’] are rhyming refrains. [4]
Here is an example of the terzanelle form:
THE BLACK DEATH
London, 1665
By Wesli Court [5]
“I have a buboe, mum,” my daughter said
and raised her sleeve to show me. In the street
the bellman cried aloud, “Bring out your dead!”
The heart of me froze like a drop of sleet,
dropped into my bowel when my darling child
Raised up her sleeve to show me. In the street
the crier’s bell rang out both dark and wild.
The end of time opened like a flower,
fell into my bowel as my darling child
showed me her fatal wound. Our final hour
blossomed before my eyes in Satan’s garden,
for the end of time had opened like a flower.
I felt the heart in me begin to harden
against a Deity who could ordain
such an evil blossoming of Satan’s garden.
What were the sins that could have earned such bane?
What sort of Deity could so ordain?
“I have a buboe, mum,” my daughter said.
The bellman cried aloud, “Bring out your dead!”
The “hybridanelle” is a combination based on the villanelle and the terzanelle. This is a complicated thirty-eight line form that
essentially has a standard villanelle and a standard terzanelle interlock by skipping every other stanza. The form was created by Erin
Thomas and a more detailed discussion can be found at http://forums.mosaicmusings.net/index.php?showtopic=5784 .
There is also a famous “mock villanelle” created by R. Sam Gwynn. This is a send up of Dylan Thomas and is essentially Do not go
gentle into that good night written in reverse. The title is Ellenalliv for Lew: On his Retirement. The poem was written for Lewis
Turco. [2]
These are some further highlighted villanelles:
Theocritus - A Villanelle by Oscar Wilde
Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Villanelle: "Wouldst thou not be content to die" by Sir Edmund William Gosse
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
A hundred online examples of villanelles and terzanelles can be found in this organized Excel spreadsheet which Bryan Bridges has
provided for Trellis Magazine:
VILLANELLE EXAMPLES CHART
[1] French, Amanda. "Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle". Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2004. http://amandafrench.
net/Dissertation.pdf (shorter article http://amandafrench.net/Villanelle1574to2005.pdf )
[2] Turco, Lewis. Personal correspondence. 2008.
[3] Excerpts from www.PoemHunter.com. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/one-art
[4] Turco, Lewis. The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.
2000.
[5] Used by permission of the author.