Villanelles, Part Two

Right on the heels of my first villanelle, I followed with this one. Read with the other, it makes for a nice set of bookends in a greeting card kind of way. I blame it on the rhymes.


I do love the word "villanelle" though. It is a beautiful word to roll off the tongue, and I regret I cannot bring the beauty to the form that the name implies.

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Daybreak

Sun is rising strong and bright.
Shadows all are set to flee.
Extinguish candles at the light.

Birds raise their voices in delight,
Calling out in vocal spree,
"Sun is rising strong and bright!"

Scour away the tips of night,
Set the sleeping hours free!
Extinguish candles at the light.

Day grows stronger, dark's in flight,
Paths are lit for all to see.
Sun is rising strong and bright.

Gray haze fades without a fight,
Nowhere left for it to be.
Extinguish candles at the light.

Morning breaks, sun gains height,
Golden rays wash over me.
Sun is rising strong and bright.
Extinguish candles at the light.

Villanelles

Villanelles are an odd, tight, technical form that originated during the Renaissance as freeform drinking songs. Somewhere along the line, supposedly in nineteenth century France, villanelles became highly structured and assumed the form they retain today: five tercets (stanzas of three lines) followed by a quatrain (stanza with four lines), with two repeating lines (refrains) and two repeating rhymes (a or b). The repeating lines are the first and third line of the first tercet. The ending quatrain also picks up those repetitious (and rhyming) lines. (Confused yet? So am I. I only write these with a penciled schematic in the margin.)

For someone like me who struggles with rhymed verse, villanelles are hell. Some poets - Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath - handled this form brilliantly. Me? I feel like I am writing script for greeting cards when I work on one.

Below is my first attempt (ever) at a villanelle, written in March of this year.

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End of Day

Daylight fades across the way.
Shadows grow, colors end.
Candles lit at end of day.

Children coming in from play,
Parting from the many friends,
Daylight fades across the way.

Supper: hunger's now at bay.
Mother with the socks to mend,
Candles lit at end of day.

Bath time now, boat display!
Homework done with, time to spend.
Daylight fades across the way.

Day is over, time to pray,
Cares and worries now to tend.
Candles lit at end of day.

Sleeping household, let it stay
Quiet while the nighttime wends.
Daylight fades across the way.
Candles lit at end of day.

A Plethora of Pantoums

Several weeks into Haiku-ca-choo!, our intrepid leader Kate formed a second Facebook group, Poetry Prom. The thought behind this group was to stretch our poetic wings and experiment with various formal poetic structures.

Initially, much like with the Haiku-ca-choo! group, Kate would set out an assignment, albeit by poetic form rather than by theme. Those of us who were game would then work with the assigned form and post our results on the group page.

The very first assignment was pantoums, a form I was unfamiliar with then. Pantoums are a Malay form of poetry and historically have been rhymed. As I noted just two days ago, I don't work well with rhymes. Luckily, a pantoum may also be unrhymed and, as you will see, all of mine are.

A pantoum is a highly structured poem. It is always written in quatrains (stanzas of four lines each). The second and fourth lines of each quatrain become the first and third line of the next quatrain until the final quatrain, which is so neatly tied back to the first and third lines of the first quatrain that you feel as if you are darning a sock.

I wrote a whole rash of pantoums and am planning on posting five of them this month. For me, they are little puzzles of words and pictures that, as the poet, I have to interlock in the course of the poem.

More than the other poetic forms, my pantoums often start with a distinct image that I have seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted. My first pantoum, set out below, was roughed out during a rehearsal I attended with Warren. The concert focused on Russian composers, and the exotic melodic lines worked their way into the poem, contrasting sharply with the cold theatre hall in which I sat.

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 Notes on a Rehearsal

There should be half-shuttered rooms,
Dust motes in strong sunlight,
Scents of cinnamon, almond,
The faint ting of finger cymbals.

Dust motes in strong sunlight?
It is still winter here, with raggedy sunshine.
The faint ting of finger cymbals
Lost in the rush of wind.

It is still winter here, with raggedy sunshine,
No place for oriental fantasias.
Lost in the rush of wind,
The Old Quarter fades away.

No place for oriental fantasias,
Scents of cinnamon, almond;
The Old Quarter fades away.
There should be half-shuttered rooms.

Another Sonnet? So Soon?

Sonnets are not an easy poetry form for me to work with, because they require both rhyme and meter (rhythm). Rhyming is hard work for me. I was raised on heavily rhymed poetry, starting with nursery rhymes and proceeding to Eugene Fields and Robert Louis Stevenson. I was in junior high before I discovered that not all poetry had to rhyme. I was further stunned to learn, contrary to what I had been taught, that free verse (which is what teachers used to call all unrhymed poetry) was not an elaborate ruse visited upon us by  "modern" (i.e., early 20th century) poets but had a proud heritage in this country courtesy of Walt Whitman.

As a result of these discoveries, I stopped writing rhymed poetry for a long time, freeing my pen from the tyranny of a rhyme scheme. After I stopped writing any poetry except the very occasional extremely light verse, I wrote only rhymed poetry. Go figure.

I am still uneasy with rhymed poetry (as you will see later this month) and often feel like a second-rate greeting card writer when I tackle it. Of all the rhymed forms, I struggle the least with sonnets. Sonnets are limited in length (only fourteen lines) and depend as heavily on the meter as they do the rhyme scheme. There are many classic sonnet forms, each with its own rhyme patterns. For the record, the sonnet below (as well as the one a few days ago and the ones to come) is written in the Shakespearian or English style. (As longtime readers know, I love Shakespeare. Besides being a whale of a playwright, Shakespeare was also no slouch as a poet, leaving us over 150 sonnets alone.) In a Shakespearian sonnet, the rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg. When it comes to sonnets, I am still working on what is known as the volta (or "turn"), which marks a change in subject matter mid-sonnet (from small picture to large picture, for example). 

Today's sonnet is a taste of what is to come not this week but the one after this one. After today, I am heading to the land of pantoums, a curious structure that Kate of Haiku-ca-choo! introduced me to some weeks ago.

So why a sonnet today? Because today is Warren's 57th birthday and this piece, which I penned a few weeks back, was written very much with us in mind.

Happy Birthday, my dear Warren!

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Sonnet for Warren

Who knows what might have come of this had we
but set aside all caution, prudence - thrown
our fates to the wind, and let fortune be
our guide in years to come.  Later, windblown,
we might then assess the damage done, or,
instead, count the stored memories we'd set
aside to stoke our hearts at cold times. For
lack of something - courage, perhaps - we bet
instead on other paths, other routes to
what we thought the future should have held, not
realizing what it would take to true
up the lines Fate had drawn but we'd not sought.
These later years seem doubly sweet to taste
for rescuing hearts, souls, and lives from waste.