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Welcome to the
Forms Page # 3
On this Page you will find instructions for :
The
Triolet ...by Gary
In some forms of Renaissance verse the rules of rhyme
and repetition were complex enough to be nearly
impossible to do well. One such example is the triolet, an eight
lined poem rhymed abaa, abab.
The fourth line had to be a repetition of the first
and the seventh and eightth lines a repition of the
first and second.
It would be interesting to see some triolet compete in
the poetry competition.
Example:
Triolet #1
The sun is shining bright,
The sky is clear and blue.
I see you framed by light,
The sun is shining bright,
Are you real or just a sprite?
Today the world feels brand new.
The sun is shining bright,
The sky is clear and blue.
Triolet #2
An old house sits on the hill,
We lived there when we were young.
As I recall, you live there still,
An old house sits on the hill.
Love can be such a bitter pill,
oh, for the songs young voices sung
an old house sits on the hill
we lived there when we were young.
(both triolet by gary)
The Quatrain
The quatrain is a four line poem that follows any one
of four different rhyme patterns.
(AABB, ABAB, ABBA or ABCB)
When quatrains are combined to make a long poem, each
group of four lines is called a stanza. Stanzas are
the paragraghs of poetry. Many ballads use the
quatrain style.
HERE ARE SOME QUATRAINS, THE FIRST IS OF THE ' ABCB'
PATTERN:
Follow Your Heart
The other day my heart spoke to me,
It was quiet I had to listen closely,
It spoke so slowly and whispered,
Whispered words of love mostly.
My heart told me a story,
about a love, relatively new,
But by the words my heart had used,
I could tell the words were true.
My heart started speaking,
It had to call quite loudly,
I hadn't realised yet,
that my heart was talking proudly.
"Now, little one, listen here,
I have some words to say.
It's time for you to step aside,
And let me lead the way."
"I'll lead you to the world,
Where you will clearly see,
What love is all about,
and what love is meant to be."
I listened to my heart
and asked "How do you know?"
"Know what, my child?" it replied,
"Know which way to go?"
"Why yes" I replied, "I mean
how shall you find the way?"
"I know just how to get there
I can take you there today."
I was hesitant at first,
as I took those first few steps.
But slowly and quite cautiously,
I plunged into the depths.
I awoke to see a heaven,
Made specifically for me.
My heart whispered "Little one,
He is your destiny..."
I cried out tears of joy,
as I looked into his eyes,
Everything felt perfect,
My heart had told no lies.
He was the one fate had made,
The one that I shall love,
He was the one sent straight to me,
From heaven high above.
I took a step towards him,
He took a step to me,
He said "I love you darling,
"This is what love is meant to be."
I started breathing deeper,
And my heart began to run,
I looked into his eyes and knew,
Our hearts had become one.
Kirsten Palmer
THIS ONE IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE 'AABB' PATTERN:
The Scarlet Pimpernel
The S. Pimpernel was considered a dandy,
But he was the one you wanted handy,
If ever a villian wanted your head,
He'd lop off that wicked man's instead
If The Scarlet Pimpernel were alive today,
We'd point a finger and laugh at his way.
For we judge by the cover of the book,
Instead of taking a longer look.
So let us not judge our different neighbor,
He may be the one who can wield a sabre,
To chase our enemies and show us the way,
To live and fight another day.
by: Joyce Johnson
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE ' ABAB' PATTERN:
On one dark and wintry day
When it was very cold,
Down flew a screaming jay
Squaking in a voice so bold.
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE ABBA PATTERN
A poet who cannot spell
is a danger to his rhyme.
Not worried he was short of thyme
the old man tarried till he arrived in hell.
by Jerry Gilliland
(all of the above poems were written by contributors
to our site)
Come my love and dance with me,
The night, like us is fresh and young
Let the music come and set you free.
Lets dance till every song is sung
let sway and eddie to the beat,
lets dance till the last flower is flung,
And comes to land beneath your feet.
Then we can take our bows, and then,
And only then, will we take a seat.
THE FOLLOWING IS AN ARTICLE ON
(The direct ancestor of the French pantoums)
TO VIEW SOME MORE PANTUNS IN MALAY AND ENGLISH GO TO THE AUTHORS WEB SITE. (It is well worth it.) PANTUNS (pantums ? pantoums ?) - A discussion on form and function by Abd Latiff bin Bidin ( latxlate@hotmail.com OR balatif@pc.jaring.my ) ( For a short intro please visit: http://members.theglobe.com/pemantun )
INTRODUCTION
Petik nenas berhati-hati................. Pluck the pineapples carefully
Bterkena duri meruncing ...............The sharp thorns may prick
Elok paras, berbudi pekerti .............A beauty, with goodness & piety
Beribu jejaka berlari mendamping ..Seekers queue a 100 thick.
The above pantun is of the common 4-line variety and of the favorite pantun topic “Budi”, a very important word and/or subject to the Malays. The word can mean either sense, kindness/goodness, intelligence, character and disposition or all of these traits rolled into one. Before we move further into the realm of the pantun
(please note that I refer to the pure Malay form and structure and not the unrecognizable (to a Malay that is…), Frenchified “pantoum” form that was taken into French and world literature by 16th century French writers - please refer to F.R.Daillie’s “Studies on the Malay Pantun”, Chapter 2 for a detailed argument on this subject).
Being neither an expert on pantun nor a true aficionado (my forte is poetry in English and translations),
I shall limit this piece to rehashing certain scholastic discussions on the analysis of the form, structure and certain characteristics of the Malay Pantun.
PANTUNS - A GRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Riddles Function à For FUN Songs
Teasing/In Jest Adat
(Customs) à For RITUALS
Religious Healing (Mantra etc)
Form & Structure à The 2-lines form (couplet)
The 4-lines form (quartrain)
More than 4 lines Linked Pantuns
Theme & Content
1. Children à Playing à Learning à Growing up à Love & Respect à Happiness & sorrow
2. Love à Getting to know à Courtship/teasing In love, vows of undying love Trials of love, together & apart Failure, rejection, dejection, loss of heart
3. Life à “Budi”, Fate, Lot of the migrant, Cynicism & Jest
4. Others à Teaching, Rituals - Religious/custom, Riddles/allegory
ETYMOLOGY Many scholars of the Malay language including Brandstetter, the world reknown expert and researcher on the languages of the Polynesia-Austronesian region, agree that the word pantun comes from root word tun. This syllable occurs in many of the Malay Archipelago lingos like Pampanga, Tagalog, Bisaya, Toba, Minangkabau etc.
In Pampanga, tuntun is ordered or properly arranged whilst in Tagalog, the same word conveys the meaning of saying something in a specific arrangement. Spooled thread is tuntun, arranged is atuntun and to lead is matuntun in old Javanese. And the word panton means either to teach (Bisaya) or respect/respectful (Toba).
The experts and scholars are also in general agreement that the first syllable of pantun i.e. pan is a derivative of the word pandai (clever) because of the poetic genre’s clever arrangement. It should be noted that in Malay, artisans, experts and smiths are called “pandai” for example an ironsmith is “pandai besi”. Thus a pantun is a cleverly arranged order of words to convey meaning in an elliptical sort of way.
R.J. Wilkinson and R.O. Winsteadt, two pre-eminent experts in the Malay language during early to mid-20th century opined that pantuns came about through the Malays’ love for phonetics and “sounds that suggest other sounds”. The suggestive sound concept thus makes assonance as well as the compulsion of rhyme the most important criteria in pantuns. For the pantun adept, using “sound correspondence” and (auto)rhymes, pantuns can be very easily created in an off the cuff sort of way, using formulaic pantun-making repertoir of rhyme equivalent and stock phrases.
This sounds confusing, but it is not. It is like using the word “moon” in the 1st line so as to be able to say “soon” in the 3rd line.
Let me illustrate by composing an original 4 line pantun in English…
Down in the meadow the lilies so yellow,
People must stop, they can’t just walk by,
(Each last word of the 1st two lines will suggest The last word of the 3rd and 4th lines. )
I am suffering here on the ground below,
Whilst you fly your fancy way up in the sky.
In days of yore when the Malays were more into culture and life than global economics and mega-projects, such a pantun above would be used as a lover’s lament decrying differences in station or social status etc.
To end this section on etymology, let me state here that in world of the Malay (of old) the word selasih (basil) automatically suggests kasih (love) whilst padi (paddy) would bring forth sudi or jadi (accept). Other popular pairs are cempedak (jackfruit)/budak (child), pagar (fence)/belajar (learn) and Jawa (Java)/nyawa (life), bintang (star)/datang (come).
CONCLUSION
Ask any pantunis (the correct word for pantunsmith would be pemantun - I am coining this term just for fun) and the person would tell you that the quartrain or 4-line format is the most popular pantun form in songs, riddles, betrothal ceremonies, mantras etc.
And just ask any Malay (particularly those born in 1970s or earlier) for her/his repertoir of pantuns, the person could easily recite 3 or 4 stock 4-line pantuns of her/his head. The pantun still remains popular to this day, otherwise you would not be reading this today.
And thanks to a number of French citizens such as Henri Fauconnier (Malaisie or The Soul of Malaya) and Francois-Rene Daillie as well as the 15th century greats who introduced “pantoums” to the western world, studies of the original Malay form continue to be conducted to this day.
Terima kasih, daun keladi Kalau boleh, kajilah lagi…
Abd Latiff bin Bidin. July 31st, 1999.
Rythm and Meter By Shiela Jensen
The term rythm refers to any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound.
In speech it is the natural rise and fall of language.
Meter is the kind of rythm we can tap our toes to. In language that is metrical
the accents are arranged as to occur at apparently equal intervals of time.
It is this interval that we mark off when we tap our toe. Metrical langauge
is called verse, nonmetrical langauge is called prose. Not all poetry is
metrical nor is all metrical langauge poetry. Verse and poetry are not
synonymous terms.
The word Meter comes from a word meaning 'to measure'.
To measure poetry we use the units: The foot, The line, and The stanza.
The basic metrical unit, the FOOT, consists normally of one accented
syllable plus one or two unaccented syllables, though occasionally there
may be no accented syllables and very rarely ther may be three.
(To show accented syllables we use __ To show unacceted syllables we use >)
> __
to day
is Iambic foot
__ >
dai ly
is Trochaic
> > __
in ter vene
is Anapastic foot
__ > >
yes ter day
isDactylic foot
__
day
is aMonosyllabic foot
__ __
day break
is a spondaic foot
The secondary unit of measurment, the LINE, is measured by naming the number of feet in it.
monmeter -- one foot
dimeter -- two feet
trimeter -- three feet
tetrameter -- four feet
pentameter-- five feet
hexameter -- six feet
heptameter --seven feet
octameter -- eight feet.
The third unit of measure, The Stanza, consists of a group of lines whos metrical pattern is repeated throughout the poem. There are many stanzaic patterns the most common being:
The quatrain - a four line stanza rhyming aabb or abab or aaba or abba or abcb (The rhyme scheme of ballade.)
Ottava rima - an eight line stanza of abababcc.
The Spenserian stanza - nine line stanza in ababbcbcc with the first eight lines Iambic petameter and the ninth Iambic hexameter.
Terza rima- sets of tercets (three line stanzas) linked together by a common rhyme: aba bcb cdc ded and so on.
While it is not necassary for poetry to conform to any metrical pattern it is fun to try to write poems, or stanzas inside poems that display the different combonations of styles, i.e. iambic trimeter, or trochaic pentameter. Have fun!
Shakespearean
Sonnet 73
by William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doeth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
consumed with that which it was nourished by.
this thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Petrarchan
In the Petrarchan form, the fourteen lines are divided into an octave of two rhyme-sounds arranged abba abba ...and a sestet of two additional rhyme sounds which may be variously arranged, the most common arrangment being cde cde. So the poem comes out with this rhyme scheme: abba abba cde cde
God's Grandeur
by G.M. Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares mans smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down in things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs-
Because the Holy ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
A sonnet sequence....is a seies of sonnets in which there is a discernable unifying theme, while each one retains its own structural independence. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets, were part of a sequence.
An open couplet may run
along like this, for the fun
of stringing thoughts line
to line, so like a vine
the thoughts weave through
the poem. And so do
not stop with each pair
of rhymes sitting there.
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
- or consider Beechings epigram in honer of Balliol College's one time master Benjamin Jowett:
I am the first: my name is Jowett:
- Whatevers's to be known, I know it.
I am the master of this College,
- And what I don't know is not knowledge.
- A stanza devised by Spenser,founded on the Italian ottava rima, It is a stanza of nine Iambic lines, all of ten syllables except the last, which is in iambic hexameter(Which is called an Alexandrine.) There are only three rhymes in a stanza, arranged in with an ababbcbcc .......rhyme scheme.
This one stanza from "The Eve of St. Agnes" by KEATS is a good example:
- Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees:
- Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
- Her rich attire creeps rustlin to her knees:
Half ridden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
- Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
- But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
Our cat is so very very old now.
Her hair is grey her teeth are falling out,
to catch a mouse, I think she forgot how.
She once was very handy to have 'bout,
now it seems all she does is sit and pout.
eat and sleep, sleep and eat thats all she does
She is a shadow of the cat she was.
Alfonso closed his speech, and begged her pardon,
Which Julia half withheld, and then half granted,
And laid conditions, he thought very hard on,
Denying several little things he wanted:
He stood like Adam near his garden,
With usles penitence perplexed and huanted,
Beseeching she no further would refuse,
When, lo ! he stumbled o'er a pair of shoes.
