You Still Want to be a Poet?
The Sonnet was too Easy for You? OK - Here's More of a Challenge in the Other Fixed Forms (and Some Unfixed Forms)

In the third article in this riveting series, we began to look at the Fixed Forms, as they are called; but as it turned out, I only got as far as the sonnet. The reason for this was that this is still the most common of the Fixed Forms used by poets, and I suggested that, even if they never left the privacy of your study (or wherever you write!), it is probably a good idea to try your hand at a sonnet or two.

In this fourth article, I will go quickly through the other common Fixed Forms, and you can see if any of them strike your fancy.

I will also say something about some of the unfixed forms.

The Ballade
As with the sonnet, this form was used by the early renaissance writers in Italy. In my last article I mentioned Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300), who left about 50 poems, two of which were canzone, and the remainder were sonnets and ballades (ballate). However, the form is generally regarded as originating in France, and was cultivated particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries. The name derives from the Old Provençal ballada, a song sung while dancing. Even today, the word is used to describe both a song and a poem; in this article (obviously!) I am going to talk just about the poetic form. Strictly, a ballad consists of three stanzas and a shortened final dedication. All of the stanzas have the same rhyme scheme; there are variations, but the most common is three eight-line stanzas rhyming ababcbcb and a four-line dedication rhyming bcbc. All the stanzas have the same final line, which thus acts as a refrain. The four-line final dedication is called the prince (because that is usually the first word) or the envoi.

It's not too easy to find a proper Ballade any more. Here is one by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956): Ballade of Liquid Refreshment.

The Sestina
This is an elaborate verse form developed before 1200 by a Provençal troubador, Arnaut Daniel, and employed by medieval Provençal and Italian poets. Both Petrarch and Dante composed sestinas. What was it with Provençe all those years ago? They seemed to spend all their time inventing new verse forms!

This one, in its pure medieval form, consisted of six stanzas of blank verse, each of six lines, followed by a three-line stanza. The final words of each of the lines of the first stanza appear in varied order in the next five stanzas. The order used by the Provençals was abcdef;faebdc;cfdabe;ecbfad;deacfb;bdfeca. In the final stanza, the six key words are repeated in the middle and at the end of the lines, summarizing the poem, or dedicating it to some one.

The form was revived in the 16th century by a group of French poets known as La Pléiade, and in particular by one of their members, Pontus de Tyard (1522-1605) (who appears to have been a real elitist snob, by the way). In the 19th century Ferdinand, Count de Gramont, wrote a large number of sestinas, and Algernon Charles Swinburne composed a remarkable double sestina with twelve stanzas of twelve lines each, called Complaint of Lisa.

Don't you just hate people like that? As though it wasn't difficult enough as it was!

In the 20th century Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden all wrote sestinas, it is alleged. I've been having a little trouble tracing examples for Auden and Eliot. But this example by Pound (1885-1972) is excellent: Sestina: Altaforte.

Note that in this case the words 'opposing' and 'rejoicing' do not actually appear in the final stanza.

Actually, Bertran de Born (note the slight difference in spelling) was Vicomte de Hautofort (1140-1212), a French soldier and a celebrated medieval troubadour. He warred with his brother Constantin (twice!) for the sole possession of the family heritage. Their liege lord was Richard the Lion-Heart, who initially favored Constantin, but later reconciled with Bertran, who then abetted Richard and his brothers in their rebellion against their father, Henry II of England. Richard became King of England in 1189, and Bertran then accompanied him on his crusade to Palestine. After he returned to France, he wrote violently militant poetry, encouraging Richard in his wars with Philip II of France.

In addition to this, however, he wrote some of the most serene and beautiful poetry in Provençal (there you are again!) literature.

In Dante's Inferno he carries his severed head before him like a lantern, and is compared with Achitophel, who also incited a royal son, Absalom, against his father David. (This is from Merriam-Webster).

I don't suppose you care about this, really, but it does show how well-researched Pound's poem is.

Remember this: writing poetry is often a much more complex and intellectual matter than it may appear. You can, of course, enjoy this poem without any real knowledge either of the history on which it is based, or the complexity (and history!) of the poetic form in which it is couched.

But I think it increases the long-term value of the work.

Rondeau
Or rondel, or roundel. This is a French form and dates from the 13th cenury (rondel) and the 14th century (rondeau). The rondel usually consists of 14 lines of 8 or 10 syllables, divided into three stanzas, two quatrains and a sextet, with the first two lines of the first stanza serving as the refrain of the second and third stanzas. Edmund Gosse, Robert Louis Stevenson, and W. E. Henley wrote rondels.

The rondeau is more or less the same; 13 or 15 lines; it has three stanzas with five, four, and six lines Only the beginning of the first line of the first stanza is used as the refrain of the last two. It has only two rhymes, allowing no repetition of rhyme words; the rhyme scheme is aabba;aabc;aabbac where c stands for the refrain.

John Frederick Nims says that these "…tend to be bookish - the kind of thing literary folk like to try their hand at instead of doing crossword puzzles, or that young writers attempt once or twice as a stunt."

Triolet
This name is Middle French, and derives from clover leaf. It has eight lines; the first is repeated as the fourth and seventh, and the second as the eighth. The rhyme scheme is AbaAabAB, where the capital letters signify the repeated lines. The art of the triolet is in using the refrain line with naturalness and in each repetition slightly altering its meaning.

The earliest English triolets were of a devotional nature composed by Patrick Carey, a Benedictine monk, in 1651. It was reintroduced by Robert Bridges in 1873.

Here is a well-known triolet from Frances Cornford (1887-1960), which shows how you can achieve a significant result even with such a constrained form: To A Fat Lady Seen From The Train.

Villanelle
The word means rustic song, and the earliest examples date from the late 16th century. At that time, they were essentially unrestricted in form, but the modern highly restricted form is patterned on a very popular Villanelle written by Jean Passerat (1534-1602), "J'ai perdu ma tourtourelle" ('I Have Lost My Turtle Dove').

The form consists of 19 lines, in six stanzas; five tercets followed by a quatrain. It has only two rhymes, and the first line (A1) and the third line (A2) are repeated according to the following scheme: A1bA2;abA1;abA2;abA1;abA2;abA1A2.

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) wrote:

A dainty thing's the villanelle;
It serves its purpose passing well

The Newer 'Fixed Forms'
In the first of these articles I said a little about other fixed forms of more recent origin: the limerick, the clerihew, the haiku. I don't think I have to say more about the limerick, apart perhaps to remark that it consists of five lines , with three feet in lines 1,2, and 5; and two feet in lines 3 and 4; and that (by and large) the feet are anapests (dee dee DUM). The rhyming scheme is aabba.

The clerihew, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, consists of four lines rhymed aabb. The lines aren't of any particular length, and the clerihew generally presents a 'potted biography':

Sir Christopher Wren 
Said, 'I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's.'

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

Now that's my kind of poetry!

The haiku is an unrhymed Japanese form consisting of seventeen syllables, arranged in three lines having five, seven, and five syllables. The form gained distinction in the 17th century, and it continues to be Japan's most popular poetic form. The intention is to express much and suggest more in the fewest possible words. This is a translation of a haiku by the great 17th century master Basho:

Lightning in the sky!
In the deeper dark is heard
A night-heron's call.  

In my opinion,
The haiku ought to be left
To the Japanese.

Here is an example by E. William Seaman (I got this from Western Wind: an introduction to poetry by John Frederick Nims):

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!"

Some Unfixed Forms

There are other words used to describe poems which do not necessarily correspond to well-defined forms; here are a few of these.

Ballads
The fixed form Ballade described above is easily confused with the large number of poems described simply as ballads. The folk ballad, also called the standard ballad, 'tells a compact tale in a style that achieves bold, sensational effects through deliberate starkness and abruptness' (Merriam-Webster). There are a number of commonly used devices, one of which is the frequent repetition of some key word, line or phrase. This form was first recorded in a collection that dates from 1300, and is earlier than that, although almost certainly not earlier than 1100.

The later, 'literary ballad' does not have the impersonal characteristics of the folk ballad, but calls attention to itself and to its composer.

The most common meter in English ballads consists of iambic lines of seven accents, with a two-line stanza, called the ballad stanza. However, this is usually printed in four-line stanzas, rhyming abcb, with lines one and three tetrameters and lines two and four trimeters.

Sir Patrick Spens is a classic example of the folk ballad by an anonymous author. John Keats wrote an example of a ballad which looks like a folk ballad, but is actually a literary ballad (note the appearance of the author!): La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Odes
The word 'ode' is used a lot in poetry, but there isn't exactly a good definition of what is meant. A poem that directly expresses the emotions of its real - or imagined! - speaker is called a lyric. It tends to be short, and originally would have been sung, or at least accompanied by music. The term ode is used for a longer, perhaps more elaborate poem of this general kind.

However, there is a longer history. The word derives from the Greek, and is a derivative of aeídein, to sing. It describes a ceremonious lyric poem on an occasion of public or private celebration, and is marked by exaltation of feeling and style. The Grecian odes had varying lengths of line, and complex stanza forms. The best-known of the Greek composers of odes is almost certainly Pindar (518 BCE - 438 BCE), and an informative book is that in the Everyman's University Library series, The Odes of Pindar, Translated by Geoffrey S. Conway (J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1972).

Pindar wrote his odes to celebrate specific events, for example the success of an athlete at a major Games. They were accompanied by music and dancing. The structure was very specific: the first stanza was called the strophe; the second the antistrophe. These were followed by the epode. There might be several sets of this three stanza pattern in the complete ode. The strophe and the antistrophe had the same number of lines, and the meter was also the same; the epode had a different number of lines and a different meter. As with all the older Greek poems, there was no rhyming; however the metrical structure was complicated and very specific, but it is difficult to describe it in English (or at least I can't do it!). The literal meaning of these terms is: strophe - a turning; antistrophe - a turning back; and epode - the song that follows. These related to the forms of the dance: the first corresponds to the opening dance; in the second, the dance is reversed; and in the third, the dancers are stationary.

Thomas Gray (1716-1771) wrote a Pindaric ode in English, called The Bard. He used a sonnet form for the strophe and the antistrophe, which is an ingenious way of showing the general structure; his epode had twenty lines, with a different rhyming scheme. Here is his Ode: The Bard: A Pindaric Ode.

Closer to us is the great Latin poet, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, (65 BCE - 8 BCE), known as Horace. After Julius Caesar's murder in 44 BCE, Horace joined Brutus's army, which was defeated two years later. Horace went back to Rome, where he was brought to Octavian's (later Augustus Caesar) attention. His first book of poetry was a set of ten poems written in hexameter verse, called the Satires which were published in 35 BCE. He published three books of Odes, comprising 88 short poems, in 23 BCE. A fourth book of 15 Odes was published in 13 BCE.

Although he always claimed to base is work on that of the Greeks, his Odes are quite different in character to those of Pindar. His tone is generally serious and serene, often touched with irony and melancholy, but sometimes with gentle humor. In the terminology we have used earlier, it is lyric poetry.

I think his best-known Ode is the 11th in the first Book:

Tu ne quaesieris - scire nefas -quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconë, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros.  Ut melius quicquid erit pati,
seu pluris hiemes, seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum.  Sapias, vina liques, et sapio brevi
spem longam reseces.  Dum loqimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Well, I wanted you to see what a short and simple poem it is, and none of the extant translations get this across. One of the versions I have, for example, is by the celebrated Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (1803-1873) ("It was a dark and stormy night…."). It's actually a pretty good translation, but the heaviness of the English doesn't begin to do justice to Horace. Another - much more recent - translation is by David Ferry, who attempts to convey the mood and tone of Horace to a modern reader, but for this Ode at least allows himself to get a long way from what Horace actually said, and in my opinion eliminates much of the historical significance.

So, what is it about? Leuconë is a girl's name, and the Ode addresses her. The overall message is: don't try and guess what the future will bring; seize the moment, and give no thought for tomorrow.

So: the opening phrase is: 'Don't [you] seek to know what the gods have in store for me, for you'. The interpolated aside - scire nefas - is usually translated as '[you're] forbidden to know', but the word nefas actually means much more than 'forbidden'. It means "that which is forbidden by divine command" and some even more weighty things.

The expression 'nec Babylonios/ temptaris numeros.' says, in essence, 'not by the Babylonian tests [based on] numbers'. This was a common popular method of fortune telling based on a numbers method, akin to some modern astrological techniques: it was portrayed as derived from the 'ancient knowledge of the Babylonians'.

Then it says, 'It is better to accept whether Jupiter has assigned many winters, or whether this is the last, which now opposes the weakness of the pumice [or other weak rock] of the Tyrrhenian sea'.

Then: 'Taste the clarified [filtered] wine, and think little of long hopes cut short.'

Then: 'While we are speaking, our lifetime is running away'.

Carpe diem: choose the day; (or: seize the present);

Believe in the smallest way (not at all) of the next day.'

This is the crudest of translations, of course: but the point is to give you the idea of what Horace said, without the obscuration of people trying to translate it into English poetry.

The idea of living for the moment has greatly appealed to different English poets: a group of them was called the 'Carpe Diem Poets': Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) were two of them.

Shakespeare has the Clown sing, in Twelfth Night (Act II, Scene III):

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true-love's coming,
	That can sing both high and low:
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journey's end in lovers' meeting,
	Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth has present laughter;
	What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,
	Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Now, the modern view of the Ode depends on poets such as John Keats (Ode on a Grecian Urn), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ode to the West Wind), neither of which I will quote here; but our ever-resourceful webmaster will no doubt give us all a url!

So there you are. Choose your weapons, and have at it!

Next time: Free Verse.

I promise!