Stephen Fry on Form, Part 7
As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 7, on more closed forms.
An alternate name for this section of the chapter on form could easily have been “closed forms that make use of repetition.” And start with the letter R. Not every form in this chapter hits the latter requirement, but they are all forms that involve repetition of part or all of a line.
The forms in this chapter include the rondeau, the rondeau redouble, the rondel, the roundel, the rondelet, the roundelay … okay, this is ridiculous! Especially because pretty much the rules for each and every one of these involve only a and b rhymes and repetition or all or a part of a line in different place. The difference is mainly where those repeats go and whether it’s abab, aabb, abba, or something else. And even Fry says you could basically just call these all variations on the roundeau. This is compounded by the examples of each form having minor variations of their own when compared against another poem of that form.
The pattern finally breaks with the last two forms, the triolet and kyrielle, both of which do involve repetition, but their names don’t start with R. So it makes sense to include them here, but again, the rhyme scheme can vary, and you can slightly modify the refrain, so they’re just named differently than the other forms.
The exercise for this section is to write a triolet (which I’ve done before) and a rondeau redouble, which I might do later.
Next up is comic forms, so hopefully fewer things that start with R!
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