A Haiku, a Rondeau, and a Villanelle Walk into a Bar
SOMETIMES, IF I WANT TO SEE BLANK FACES, I WILL MENTION THE word “sestina.” There are a lot of tricks in the book, but this one is special. It never fails. This is not an indictment of students, current culture, or the state of the American education system. Unless you are a poet of a certain type or a scholar of poetry at a fairly high level, there is simply no reason to know the term. Even with a hundred billion neurons in the brain, some things aren’t worth the storage space.
SHORT STUFF
I KNOW, I know. You hear “poetic forms” and your skin starts to crawl. But let’s start with a couple of forms that should never scare anyone. Most of us encountered the haiku in the middle grades, which is about right. At that age, we can count and mostly manage simple sentences, which is all that’s required. The rules as we know them: three lines, 5–7–5 syllables respectively, two images juxtaposed. A friend of mine has long claimed that the last line of all haiku should be “cherry blossoms,” but that’s just silly. Only four syllables.
On one level, the haiku is simplicity itself. The form is a little more complex in Japanese, but not greatly so. Here’s one from Basho, the seventeenth-century godfather of the haiku:
An old silent pond . . .
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.
Simple, right? You read a good haiku and think, I could do that. And you probably could. But it’s not the form that’s tough; it’s the compression. What can you say in so small a space, and how well can you say it? There is structure, but a haiku isn’t a house, it’s a crystal.
That crystalline quality was one reason the haiku found favor in the early twentieth century with the rise of Imagism, a movement built around stripping poetry down to its most basic element, the creation of a brilliant image. Think Pound’s Metro station and Williams’s red wheelbarrow. Those aren’t haiku, but they are tiny, single-focused, and wonderfully evocative. What’s not to love?
So what about everybody’s favorite tiny poem, the limerick? Yes, Virginia, it is a real poetic form. Only the poems are not so serious. We’re talking a five-line poem rhyming AABBA. The meter is generally mixed, iambic and anapestic, meaning two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed. Every line begins with an iamb or sometimes a trochee, and lines one, two, and five then have two of those anapestic feet (“da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM”), lines two and four just one (“da-DUM da-da-DUM”). It seems to be a form that says, “Insert joke here”:
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!—
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard.”
Those two short lines are almost custom designed—in the form, not just in this poem—for the delivery of a punch line. Edward Lear is fond of reusing one of the rhyming words from the first two lines to end the poem, a tendency not widely shared. He is also a writer of clean limericks, another trait that is observed somewhat less than universally. Some commentators, among them George Bernard Shaw, claim that a poem is only a limerick if it observes the rules and is dirty. Most people, by the time they reach their majority, will have heard at least a couple dirty limericks. Rugby players, hundreds. There is even a limerick to that effect from the well-known poet Anonymous:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
You can’t say fairer than that.
VILLANELLE
A VILLANELLE LOOKS as if it has nineteen lines, but it really only has thirteen, since two of them get repeated. Repeatedly. Lines one and three of the first stanza form the refrain and then are deployed alternately. This means that line one is the refrain of stanzas two and four, while line two is the refrain of stanzas three and five. They then come together at the end, standing as the final two lines of the poem. Again with the math! Maybe it’s not poetry people dislike but counting. It’s far easier to see than to envision, so let’s look at Dylan Thomas’s most famous poem, whose title is also its first line:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The beauty is that, however confusing the form is in the abstract, there is nothing hard about a good one in practice, and this is a not-merely-good one. Here is another use of terza rima in poetry: the rhyme scheme is merely ABA for each stanza with an added line (for an ABAA scheme) on the last one. It has a specialized form, of course, because of the repeated lines. I tried typing it out, but the word processor had ideas of its own and the schematic rendering just made things worse. But you have only to look at the poem again to see how smoothly it reads in practice. As with every form, the villanelle’s rules make for some specialized outcomes. For one thing, you have to plan for every stanza to form a complete thought, usually in two lines with the refrain acting as, well, a refrain. Notice that Thomas’s second lines are end-stopped with at least a comma, except for the second, where “Because their words had forked no lightning they” requires “Do not go gentle into that good night” to make any sense. Only the final stanza comes to a full stop after line two; lesser punctuation marks off the other four. On one level, that’s a lot of pressure, the need to make every stanza a complete statement. On the other, the poet knows in advance what his third line will be, so he can build toward it. That’s the challenge of the form. It also carries a major reward: because of the repetition of both refrain lines at the end, no form feels more satisfyingly finished than the villanelle. It more or less says, “There! Wasn’t that grand?” And in this case, it certainly is.
There is one further benefit, compositionally, to the villanelle. True, the form has very strict regulations for the number of lines and how they are arrayed, but it has no such restrictions on meter. I’m pretty sure this was an oversight by some committee, but it offers a bit of freedom to the poet. Most nineteenth-century villanelles in English were in tetrameter or even trimeter, while the majority of twentieth-century versions were in pentameter. The one thing that all seem to agree on is that, having chosen a meter, the poet is obliged to stick with it.
SESTINA
I’M GOING TO let one of us off the hook here with just a warning. I said before that there is almost no occasion for civilians to know this form, and I’m sticking with it. The sestina originated around 1200 with one of the troubadours, Arnaut Daniel, whom Dante called “il miglior fabbro” (“the better maker”) but still consigned to Purgatory. The form is devilish in its own right. The poem consists of six six-line stanzas, often with a three-line epilogue, called an envoi, appended at the end. There is typically no rhyming (French, remember?), but the last words of all six lines of the first stanza are also the last words of the lines of each subsequent stanza, with a kind of round-robin change of order. The sixth rhyme hustles up to the front of the line: 123456, 612345, 561234, and so on. The form is rather uncommon in English. Edmund Spenser has one and Sir Philip Sidney three in the sixteenth century, and Ezra Pound has a famous one in the twentieth century, and there are a few scattered others, chiefly from a period of Francophile poetic practice in the late nineteenth century. On the whole, however, you’re pretty safe from sestina attack. Actually, I’m thinking it may be the sestina form and not lust that led Dante to make Daniel do penance in Purgatory.
RONDEAU AND TRIOLET
SONNETS, OF COURSE, we have discussed elsewhere, but there’s an odd cousin, a sort of almost-sonnet, that came out of medieval France and made its way in a slightly updated form to sixteenth-century England and is called a rondeau. Even if we don’t know its history, we know that pretty much whenever we find an e and an a hanging out with a u (think “beauty”), the French are implicated. And if we had any doubts, it employs the word “rentrement,” which can only come from one spot on earth. The rondeau consists of fifteen lines divided unevenly among three stanzas, with only two rhymes and a repeat of the first phrase of the first line, which is the rentrement. The rhyme scheme, as you may have surmised, is peculiar: AABBA-AABR-AABBAR, where R indicates rentrement, that repeated first phrase.
You might suppose that with this lengthy pedigree and exotic rules, including how to make a plural, that rondeaux (see?) would be the exclusive property of mighty fancy poets. Not so. Some of the most famous examples come from very plainspoken men, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and the following man.
If Canadians—and plenty of Americans and British subjects, too—wear poppies in their lapels on November 11, it is because of this 1915 poem. Its author, Major John McCrae, a doctor with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I, wrote it in response to the death of a close comrade. Poppies, he knew, are among the first colonizers of disturbed ground.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
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.
This poem makes use of a three-part structure about as well as a poem possibly can. The first stanza contrasts growing poppies and singing larks with the stillness of cemeteries and the din of war. The second stanza identifies the speakers (and it is plural: “We are the dead”) as the very recently dead in that war, while the third exhorts the living to keep faith with those who have sacrificed themselves, to take up the cause to which lives have been freely given. It also comes with a warning: “We shall not sleep” should the living shirk their duty; the poppies will provide no solace. The movement of the poem is sure and swift, as it must be, given the length.
The form makes demands of the poet, requiring him or her to be efficient, to fit thoughts into the available space and to order those thoughts in a way that makes sense within that space. It won’t do, for instance, to carry over a thought to the next stanza and then begin a new thought midway through. At the same time, those thoughts, or rather the words that embody those thoughts, have to fit a very demanding framework of rhyme. The poet has only two rhyming sounds with which to work, and one recurs eight times, the other five. McCrae chooses wisely with the long i and long o, which give him as many options as one could reasonably desire. Each stanza has its own peculiarities regarding rhyme. In stanza one, the A rhyme finishes lines 1, 2, and 5, the B rhyme 3 and 4. Stanza two subtracts one rhyme from each sound, the A rhyme finishing lines 1 and 2, the B rhyme only line 3, followed by the half-line rentrement that rhymes only with itself. It is unusual in the extreme to see a rhyme occur only once in a stanza, but that is the requirement of this form. The third stanza, although it reprises the 1–2–5/3–4 scheme of the first, then appends the unrhymed rentrement to close the poem.
Perhaps the best feature of his rhyme scheme is that he withholds the key words “die” and “grow” until the last iteration of the respective rhymes. Clearly, the entire poem has been leading to the mention of dying, but he manages to keep the word itself at bay for as long as possible. We might expect the poppies in line one to “grow,” but in fact they “blow,” reserving the former word for the key location at the end.
McCrae, as fortune would have it, died of pneumonia in January 1918 and joined the host of the fallen at Wimereux Cemetery near Boulogne. A memorial was later erected in the vicinity of Ypres, near where he was operating on the wounded when he wrote the poem.
The rondeau is especially well suited to terse, three-part movements. Not large in scale, it permits, even requires, the quick transitions from point to point so that the meaning is not lost. And as this example demonstrates, it is capable of great thematic power.
A CLOSE COUSIN OF THE RONDEAU IS THE TRIOLET, ALSO FROM MEDIEVAL France, also using repeated lines. The triolet is a mere eight lines with the wording of line one repeated in lines four and seven, while the wording of line two recurs in the last line. Changes in punctuation, as with many of these forms, is not merely permitted but almost mandatory. Thomas Hardy, one of the great English poets, shows just what can be done with changes in tiny marks between words in his “Birds at Winter Nightfall”:
Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house. The flakes fly!—faster
Shutting indoors the crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The flakes fly faster
And all the berries now are gone!
Notice how the lines change between “Around the house the flakes fly faster,” “Around the house. The flakes fly!—faster,” and “Around the house. The flakes fly faster.” Clearly, Hardy was having a really good time wringing different meanings from those seven words by small shifts in punctuation. I have nothing concrete to go on but suspect he would have been most proud of the second half of the line in the last two. Strictly speaking, the exclamation mark in line eight is a violation of the strict repetition in the original form. That’s okay, though: we generally value innovation more than convention. The form, after a brief vogue in the late nineteenth century, has largely fallen into disuse. That just means it is due for a reboot. After all, it is brief and a lot of fun.
ELEGY
AN ELEGY is a poem memorializing someone recently deceased and, usually, known to the poet. Sometimes, as with Whitman’s elegy for the fallen President Lincoln, “known to the poet” is a loose term:
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
The thing about elegies is that they are a type rather than a form. An elegy can be pastoral, replete with shepherds overseeing invisible flocks and muses in fancy dress as shepherdesses. Or they can be Pindaric odes with three-part structures, a form Seamus Heaney employed in several elegies for victims of the Northern Irish troubles, as did Auden in his memorial poem for W. B. Yeats. Here, Whitman does something appropriate to the seagoing nineteenth century and makes Lincoln the fallen captain of a ship that he has brought safely home. In doing so, he allows full play to the irony that the president was killed just at the moment of triumph for him and the Republic. The contrast between exultation (which he emphasizes repeatedly) and mourning is played for maximum force. Notice that he uses his own three-part structure. In the first stanza, he emphasizes the success of the voyage—the prosecution of the war—which he follows in the second with an injunction to “My Captain” to rise up and hear the celebratory bells. In the final stanza, the harsh reality—already established with “You’ve fallen cold and dead” earlier—sets in: the Captain lies “pale and still,” unable to witness the fruits of his labor. This is one of the most nearly perfect elegies ever written. Whitman could be a little lax about form elsewhere; in this case, he practices a rigorous discipline appropriate to his poem’s occasion. If elegies hadn’t already existed, this would be the model. Perhaps it is anyhow.
ODE
IN CONTRAST TO elegies, odes are characterized by form; in contrast to sonnets, that form is pretty loose. The typical definitions speak of somewhat greater length, seriousness of tone and subject, formal structure, and movement of mind. Pindar is the father of one type of ode, quite formal in language and possessing a three-part movement drawn from Greek dramatic choral odes. The first movement is called the strophe, which sets the poem in motion in a particular direction. The second, the antistrophe, offers a countermovement of thought. The third, or epode, attempts some sort of resolution between the warring elements of the first two. With the odes in Greek drama, the chorus actually moved in space to support the movement between thought and counterthought; the resolving epode did not always make an appearance in choral odes, depending on the demands of the dramatic action itself and the lack of resolution within the chorus, which represented the mind of the citizens of the locale where the play was set. Pindar, having no such limitations, pretty much always arrives at a conclusion. The odes of Horace were somewhat less formally strict and more meditative in tone and mood. Poets ever since have been choosing between Pindaric and Horatian approaches, although succeeding ages took liberties with the form. When the ode arrived in England, poets wrought their own changes until the form landed in the hands of John Keats, who employs as many stanzas as he deems necessary and wrote what are called the “Five Great Odes”—“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “To Autumn”—in 1819. A single year! After Keats, few poets in English undertook writing odes, as if they could see no way of measuring up, or perhaps he had done everything worth doing with the form. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes the urn in great detail, with a “sylvan” scene of a maiden being pursued by a would-be lover, the whole thing being caught in midchase, never to move forward. While another poet might lament the uncompleted action, Keats celebrates the perfection of the frozen moment.
Across the five stanzas of the poem, his thoughts develop and shift sinuously. He begins with an address to his subject:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme[.]
Like the fleeing maiden we’ve yet to meet, the urn is a “still unravish’d bride” not of some masculine figure but of “quietness.” Or, if you prefer, it is a “foster-child of silence and slow time,” not inevitable figures of parenthood. He salutes the urn as the superior storyteller who can “express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.” In the second stanza he elaborates on the theme of silence:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone[.]
This is music for the spirit rather than the ear. The beauty of the scene lies not in its realization but in its potentiality, for the way that it adumbrates its story rather than filling in all the details. Which praise he delivers in considerable detail. Throughout the second and third stanzas he lauds the permanence of the scene: the lover cannot extract his kiss, but on the other hand, neither he nor his quarry will ever age, nor will they be subject to the heartaches of real human love. Stanza four offers further detail of the urn’s pictorial tale: priests coming to a sacrifice, leading a garlanded heifer, townsfolk following along and leaving, thereby, a town forever abandoned (because they are on the urn and not back at home), everything captured in clay. Forever.
He concludes the poem by praising the urn’s permanence, against which contrasts the sad transience of real life, including his own art:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“You’ll be here long after my time has passed and some other generation has brought along its own miseries,” he says. And then he gives to the urn an aesthetic statement like no other, that not only are beauty and truth the same thing, but that is all humans know or need to know. Pretty bold stuff for a piece of crockery. The movement of the poem from quiet admiration to audacious address is managed by a series of small steps that belie its large ambitions.
This sort of poem, which strives to capture an object or scene or, as here, a work of art, is called ekphrastic, which means something like capturing other arts in words or translating from one medium to another. Yet another literary term with which to astonish your friends and confound your enemies. A very nice poem with which to contrast this one is contemporary poet Eavan Boland’s “The Photograph on My Father’s Desk,” in which a set of actions—a woman placing her hand on her throat in surprise, a pitcher of lemonade being stirred, a man striding down a path—are similarly frozen by the act of photography. Here, however, Boland emphasizes the incompleteness of the action: each imminent action will never be fulfilled. Understanding that she can never see beyond the surface of the picture, can never achieve a fuller understanding of the scene, she displays more regret than Keats at the action remaining static. Ekphrastic poems usually seek to emulate the thing described in some way. Keats, for instance, hopes for a similar kind of permanence for his poem, although, given his obscurity at the time, the hope may seem tenuous at best. Boland, who has a whole series of poems on objects and artifacts in her volume Outside History (1990), is more ambivalent about the artwork in front of her. Since it represents, sitting on her father’s desk as it does, some unknown tale from family history, the loss of detail is a source of longing as well as fascination. Her poem is no ode, but it stands as a worthy companion piece to a poem that is.
PASTORAL
PASTORAL POETRY is another instance of type over form. As with elegies, the pastoral can take various forms and serve various purposes from the funereal (in which case, it would be a pastoral elegy) to the celebratory. We may see, in classical poems and their more recent inheritors (recent as in sixteenth century), shepherds and shepherdesses. Or perhaps the people in the poem will be Wordsworth’s rustic country folk or Frost’s solitary figures and couples in crisis. What lies behind the pastoral, usually unspoken, is a sort of nostalgia for some golden past (although we might give Frost or Ted Hughes a pass on this aspect) of rural simplicity by urban dwellers. The poems are written, after all, more often by a resident living in Athens or Rome or London than by someone busy dodging sheep droppings.
SO IS THAT IT FOR THE CATALOG OF FORMS? NOT EVEN CLOSE. OVER the centuries, forms have come and gone and sometimes come again, have jumped from one culture to another, have undergone changes. We discussed the ballad and sonnet earlier, so you can add them to your database of poetic forms. What we do well to remember is that, far from being restrictive, poetic forms are rife with possibilities. There are things you can do—and things you’re freed from doing—by choosing a sonnet rather than an ode, a triolet rather than a sonnet. Just as the limerick lends itself to the joke and the haiku to the image, every form lends itself to certain modes of expression. We should admire, beyond the technical mastery, the wisdom of choosing a particular form when a poem seems to do its job well.