IN the rough: December 2010

August Challenge

My poetry challenge for August will be the triolet, a short poem of eight lines with only two rhymes used throughout. The requirements of this fixed form are for the first line to be repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; the second line is repeated in the final line; with the first two end-words used to complete the tight rhyme scheme. The poet writes only five original lines, giving the triolet a deceptively simple appearance: ABaAabAB, where capital letters indicate repeated lines.

French in origin, and likely dating to the thirteenth century, the triolet is a close cousin of the rondeau, another French verse form emphasizing repetition and rhyme. The earliest triolets were devotionals written by Patrick Carey, a seventeenth-century Benedictine monk. British poet Robert Bridges reintroduced the triolet to the English language, where it enjoyed a brief popularity among late-nineteenth-century British poets. Though some employed the triolet as a vehicle for light or humorous themes, Thomas Hardy recognized the possibilities for melancholy and seriousness, if the repetition could be skillfully employed to mark a shift in the meaning of repeated lines.

In "How Great My Grief," Hardy displays both his mastery of the triolet and the potency of the form:

How great my grief, my joys how few,   Since first it was my fate to know thee!   - Have the slow years not brought to view   How great my grief, my joys how few,   Nor memory shaped old times anew,       Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee   How great my grief, my joys how few,       Since first it was my fate to know thee?

The first line, "How great my grief, my joys how few," is, in its two subsequent appearances, modified by the movement of time in the poem. Initially, the line assumes a declarative position, indicating the subject and tone of the poem, one of grief and love lost. By its third iteration, after several queries to the person being addressed, the line takes on the added weight of the speaker’s astonished grief that the addressee has not, despite the years, recognized the speaker’s profound sense of loss.

Source - poetry.org

June Challenge

The challenge for this month is the Sestina, a form of poetry that uses a method of repeating words at the end of each line. It has 6 stanzas of 6 lines each with a tercet of three lines to conclude the poem. The metre is not prescribed, although very short lines are unlikely. With the repetitions, the effect may be compared to change-ringing on bells.

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

The envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines.

Sestina by Dante Alighieri

I have come, alas, to the great circle of shadow,
to the short day and to the whitening hills,
when the colour is all lost from the grass,
though my desire will not lose its green,
so rooted is it in this hardest stone,
that speaks and feels as though it were a woman.

And likewise this heaven-born woman
stays frozen, like the snow in shadow,
and is unmoved, or moved like a stone,
by the sweet season that warms all the hills,
and makes them alter from pure white to green,
so as to clothe them with the flowers and grass.

When her head wears a crown of grass
she draws the mind from any other woman,
because she blends her gold hair with the green
so well that Amor lingers in their shadow,
he who fastens me in these low hills,
more certainly than lime fastens stone.

Her beauty has more virtue than rare stone.
The wound she gives cannot be healed with grass,
since I have travelled, through the plains and hills,
to find my release from such a woman,
yet from her light had never a shadow
thrown on me, by hill, wall, or leaves’ green.

I have seen her walk all dressed in green,
so formed she would have sparked love in a stone,
that love I bear for her very shadow,
so that I wished her, in those fields of grass,
as much in love as ever yet was woman,
closed around by all the highest hills.

The rivers will flow upwards to the hills
before this wood, that is so soft and green,
takes fire, as might ever lovely woman,
for me, who would choose to sleep on stone,
all my life, and go eating grass,
only to gaze at where her clothes cast shadow.

Whenever the hills cast blackest shadow,
with her sweet green, the lovely woman
hides it, as a man hides stone in grass.

February Challenge

January and Nasmastomo has passed and I'll miss this daily challenge, so I have set myself a new observational writing goal for the month of February, using poetry or prose to describe someone with whom I've had an encounter that day. This may be personal, in passing, a photograph, on television or even radio. I hope to record some small detail of their life that I might otherwise have missed. It would be wonderful if others took up this challenge as a means to inspire daily writing habits.

All comments are welcome.

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