stated it is an eight-line poem whose first (A) and second (B) lines are repeated at the end: the first line also repeats as the fourth. ABaAbbAB in other words. It is, I suppose, the threefold repeat of that first line that give it the ‘trio’ name. Do you remember Frances Cornford’s ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train’ which we looked at when thinking about rhymes for ‘love’? If we look at it again, we can see that it is in fact a triolet.O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,Missing so much and so much?O fat white woman whom nobody loves,Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,When the grass is soft as the breast of dovesAnd shivering sweet to the touch?O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,Missing so much and so much?
Here is another, written by the unfortunately named American poet Adelaide Crapsey:I make my shroud but no one knows,So shimmering fine it is and fair,With stitches set in even rows.I make my shroud but no one knows.In door-way where the lilac blows,Humming a little wandering air,I make my shroud and no one knows,So shimmering fine it is and fair.
W. E. Henley (on whom Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver) believed triolets were easy and was not afraid to say so. He also clearly thought, if his rhyming is anything to go by, that they were pronounced English-fashion, probably tree-o-let:EASY is the Triolet,If you really learn to make it!Once a neat refrain you get,Easy is the Triolet.As you see!–I pay my debtWith another rhyme. Deuce take it,Easy is the Triolet,If you really learn to make it!
They are certainly not easy to master but–as my maudlin attempt suggests, and as Wendy Cope’s ‘Valentine’ rather more stylishly proves–they seem absolutely tailor-made for light love poetry:My heart has made its mind upAnd I’m afraid it’s you.Whatever you’ve got lined up,My heart has made its mind upAnd if you can’t be signed upThis year, next year will do.My heart has made its mind upAnd I’m afraid it’s you.
One more repeating form to look at before we atrophy.
KYRIELLEThe chanting of a KYRIELLETolls like the summons of a bellTo bid us purge our black disgrace.Lord a-mercy, shut my face.Upon my knees, I kiss the rod,Repent and raise this cry to God–I am a sinner, foul and baseLord a-mercy, shut my face.And so I make this plaintive cry:‘From out my soul, the demons chaseProstrate before thy feet I lie.’Lord a-mercy, shut my face.There is no health or good in me,Nor in the wretched human race.Therefore my God I cry to thee.Lord a-mercy, shut my face.Let sins be gone without a traceLord have mercy, shut my face.You’ve heard my pleas, I rest my case.Lord have mercy! Shut my face.
The name and character of the KYRIELLE derive from the Mass, whose wail of Kyrie eleison!–‘Lord, have mercy upon us’–is a familiar element. For those of us not brought up in Romish ways it is to be heard in the great requiems and other masses of the classical repertoire.
The final line of every stanza is the same, indeed rime en kyrielle is an alternative name for repeated lines in any style of poetry. Most examples of the kyrielle to be found in English are written, as mine is, in iambic tetrameter. As I have tried to demonstrate, quatrains of aabB and abaB or couplets of aA, aA are all equally acceptable. There is no set length. The Elizabethan songwriter and poet Thomas (‘Cherry Ripe’) Campion wrote a ‘Lenten Hymn’ very much in the spirit, as well as the letter, of the kyrielle:With broken heart and contrite sigh,A trembling sinner, Lord, I cry:Thy pard’ning grace is rich and free:O God, be merciful to me.I smite upon my troubled breast,With deep and conscious guilt opprest,Christ and His cross my only plea:O God, be merciful to me.
Incidentally, many kyrielles were written in 1666. Not just to apologise to God for being so sinful and tasteless as to perish in plague and fire, but because numbers were considered important and the Roman numerals in ‘LorD haVe MerCIe Vpon Vs’ add up to 1666: this is called a CHRONOGRAM.
The kyrielle need not exhibit agonised apology and tortured pleas for mercy, however. The late Victorian John Payne managed to be a little less breast-beating in his ‘Kyrielle’ as well as demonstrating the scope for slight variation in the repeat:A lark in the mesh of the tangled vine,A bee that drowns in the flower-cup’s wine,A fly in sunshine,–such is the man.All things must end, as all began.A little pain, a little pleasure,A little heaping up of treasure;Then no more gazing upon the sun.All things must end that have begun.Where is the time for hope or doubt?A puff of the wind, and life is out;A turn of the wheel, and rest is won.All things must end that have begun.Golden morning and purple night,Life that fails with the failing light;Death is the only deathless one.All things must end that have begun
Well, haven’t we learned a lot! Bags of French forms beginning with ‘r’ that repeat their lines en kyrielle. To be honest, you could call them all rondeaux and only a pedant would pull you up on it. It is not too complicated a matter to invent your own form, a regular pattern of refrains is all it takes. You could call it a rondolina or rondismo or a boundelay or whatever you fancied. Destiny and a place in poetic history beckon.
Poetry Exercise 16
Your FIRST task is to write a less emetic triolet than mine for your true love, as sweet without being sickly as you can make it, your SECOND to compose a RONDEAU REDOUBLE on any subject you please.
VIII
Comic Verse
The cento–the limerick and the clerihew–reflections on comic verse, light verse and parody
CENTOWordsworth Comes OutMy heart leaps up when I beholdThe pansy at my feet;Ingenuous, innocent and boldBeside a mossy seat.For oft when on my couch I lieUpon the growing boy,A little Cyclops with one eyeWill dwell with me–to heighten joy.
CENTOS are cannibalised verse, collage poems whose individual lines are made up of fragments of other poetry. Often each line will be from the same poet. The result is a kind of enforced self-parody. In mine above, all the lines are culled from different poems by Wordsworth. Ian Patterson has produced some corkers. Here are two, one from A. E. Housman, the other a cento stitched from Shakespeare sonnets. Just to emphasise the point: all the lines are genuine lines from the poet in question, panels torn from their own work to make a new quilt. First, his Housman Cento:The happy highways where I wentWarm with the blood of lads I knowHave willed more mischief than they durstA hundred years ago.Clay lies still, but blood’s a roverSafe through jostling markets borne;The nettle nods, the wind blows over,With hurts not mine to mourn.When you and I are spilt on air,What’s to show for all my pain?Duty, friendship, bravery o’er,And Ludlow fair again.
Extraordinary how much sense it seems to make. This is Patterson’s Shakespeare Cento:When in the chronicles of wasted timeThat thy unkindness lays upon my heart,Bearing the wanton burthen of the primeTo guard the lawful reasons on thy part,My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lieThe perfect ceremony of love’s rite,And scarcely
