by Stephen Fry
Disaster comes to those who don’t prepare
The opening stanza in an artful way
So do, dear friends, I beg of you, beware
The first four lines of rondeau redoublé.
That warning made, it’s pretty safe to say
This ancient form’s a simply wrought affair,
So long as all your rhymes, both B and A
Are chosen with especial skill and care;
For you’ll need rhymes and plenty left to spare –
A dozen words, arranged in neat array
That’s six, yes six in every rhyming pair,
For each one has a vital role to play.
So long as you these simple rules obey
You’ll have no trouble with the form, I swear.
The first four lines your efforts will repay,
In turn they each a heavy burden share,
THE FIRST FOUR LINES.
Here, as I hope my abominable but at least accurately self-referential example makes clear, each line of Stanza 1 forms in turn an endrefrain to the next four stanzas. As in the standard rondeau, the opening hemistich is repeated to form a final coda or mini-envoi. Each stanza alternates in rhyme between abab and baba.
Wendy Cope included an excellent example in her collection Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and here is Dorothy Parker’s charming (and charmingly titled) example ‘Rondeau Redoublé (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble at That)’ which has an excellent coda:
THE SAME TO ME are somber days and gay.
Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright,
Because my dearest love is gone away
Within my heart is melancholy night.
My heart beats low in loneliness, despite
That riotous Summer holds the earth in sway.
In cerements my spirit is bedight;
The same to me are somber days and gay.
Though breezes in the rippling grasses play,
And waves dash high and far in glorious might,
I thrill no longer to the sparkling day,
Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright.
Ungraceful seems to me the swallow’s flight;
As well might Heaven’s blue be sullen gray;
My soul discerns no beauty in their sight
Because my dearest love is gone away.
Let roses fling afar their crimson spray,
And virgin daisies splash the fields with white,
Let bloom the poppy hotly as it may,
Within my heart is melancholy night.
And this, oh love, my pitiable plight
Whenever from my circling arms you stray;
This little world of mine has lost its light . . .
I hope to God, my dear, that you can say
The same to me.
So let us now meet some of the rondeau’s hopeful progeny.
RONDEL
The RONDEL sends the senses reeling,
And who are we to call it dead?
Examples that I’ve seen and read
Have given me the strongest feeling
That such a form is most appealing
To those whose Heart controls their Head.
The rondel sends the senses reeling
And who are we to call it dead?
Its lines for ever roundly wheeling,
Make manifest what can’t be said.
From wall to wall and floor to ceiling
The rondel sends the senses reeling
And who are we to call it dead?
The RONDEL’S first couplet, as you can see, is repeated as a final refrain. There appears to be no set length, but in the later thirteenline or fourteen-line variants such as mine (known as RONDEL PRIME and now seemingly the standard strain in English verse) the rentrements are also repeated in the middle of the poem. Chaucer, Longfellow and others wrote poems they called rondels which appear to vary in all points except that crucial matter of the refrain. There again, Nicholas Grimald, the poet and scholar who just avoided burning under Mary Tudor and gave his name to Sirius Black’s family home in the Harry Potter books, wrote a ‘Rondel of Love’ in sixains only the first verse of which has a repeated line. Austin Dobson, who enjoyed experimenting with forms of this nature (indeed, he founded a school of poets in 1876 devoted to the rediscovery of the old French rondeau family), demonstrates what we might call the rondel’s ‘correct’ form, whose lineaments my effort also shares (the italics are mine to help point up the rentrements):
Love comes back to his vacant dwelling,
The old, old Love that we knew of yore!
We see him stand by the open door,
With his great eyes sad, and his bosom swelling.
He makes as though in our arms repelling
He fain would lie as he lay before
Love comes back to his vacant dwelling,
The old, old Love that we knew of yore!
Ah! who shall help us from over-spelling
That sweet, forgotten, forbidden lore ?
E’en as we doubt, in our hearts once more,
With a rush of tears to our eyelids welling,
Love comes back to his vacant dwelling,
The old, old Love that we knew of yore!
It is a requirement of this ‘correct’ form (one that both Dobson and I met) that of the two rhymes, one should be masculine, the other feminine, contributing to the overall call-and-response character of the form.
ROUNDEL
Swinburne developed an English version of his own which he called the ROUNDEL, as you see it is closer to a rondeau than a rondel:
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound
unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught –
Love, laughter, or mourning – remembrance of rapture or
fear –
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.
As a bird’s quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A roundel is wrought.
Rondelet
I cannot sing
A RONDELET of love to thee
I cannot sing
I try to let my voice take wing,
It never seems to stay in key
And if you heard me, you’d agree
I cannot sing
Pretty clear, clear and pretty, the RONDELET goes AbAabbA as mine demonstrates. I don’t know of any spectacular examples (aside from my own) of the rondelet, pronounced as if it were a Welsh valley song (or indeed sexual experience) a Rhondda Lay. The good old English version of the word might promise a similar form, you would be entitled to think.
ROUNDELAY
Actually the ROUNDELAY is rather different:
My hee-haw voice is like a bray
Nothing sounds so asinine
Little causes more dismay
Than my dreadful donkey whine.
Hear me sing a ROUNDELAY
There is no fouler voice than mine.
Little causes more dismay
Than my dreadful donkey whine.
Hear me sing a roundelay
There is no fouler voice than mine.
Stop your singing right away,
Else we’ll break your fucking spine.
Hear me sing a roundelay
There is no fouler voice than mine.
As you see, pairs of lines repeat in order. Here is ‘A Roundelay’ by the late seventeenth-century poet Thomas Scott:
Man, that is for woman made
And the woman made for man.
As the spur is for the jade.
As the scabbard for the blade
As for liquor is the can,
So man
is for the woman made
And the woman made for man.
And so on for two more stanzas: for Scott and his contemporaries a roundelay seemed to be any poem with the same two-line refrain at the beginning and end of each stanza, but Samuel Beckett did write a poem called ‘roundelay’ with full and fascinating internal line repetition. Your task is to find a copy of it and discover its beauties and excellence. Award yourself twenty points if you can get your hands on it within a week.
TRIOLET
This TRIOLET of my design
Is sent with all my heart to you,
Devotion dwells in every line.
This triolet of my design
Is not so swooningly divine
As you, my darling Valentine.
This triolet of my design
I send with all my heart to you.
The TRIOLET is pronounced in one of three ways: to rhyme with ‘violet’, or the halfway house tree-o-lett, or tree-o-lay in the full French manner: simply 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 doves
And 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 debt
With 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 up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made its mind up
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do.
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
One more repeating form to look at before we atrophy.
KYRIELLE
The chanting of a KYRIELLE
Tolls like the summons of a bell
To 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 base
Lord a-mercy, shut my face.
And so I make this plaintive cry:
‘From out my soul, the demons chase
Prostrate 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 trace
Lord 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 REDOUBLÉ on any subject you please.
VIII
Comic Verse
The cento – the limerick and the clerihew – reflections on comic verse, light verse and parody
CENTO
Wordsworth Comes Out
My heart leaps up when I behold
The pansy at my feet;
Ingenuous, innocent and bold
Beside a mossy seat.
For oft when on my couch I lie
Upon the growing boy,
A little Cyclops with one eye
&
nbsp; Will 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 went
Warm with the blood of lads I know
Have willed more mischief than they durst
A hundred years ago.
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover
Safe 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 time
That thy unkindness lays upon my heart,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part,
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And scarcely greet me with that sun thine eye
To change your day of youth to sullen night,
Then in the number let me pass untold
So that myself bring water for my stain,
That poor retention could not so much hold
Knowing thy heart torment me in disdain:
O cunning love, with tears thou keep’st me blind,
Since I left you my eye is in my mind.
They are, I suppose, no more than a game, but one which can be surprisingly revealing. If nothing else, they provide a harmlessly productive way of getting to know a particular poet’s way with phrase and form. Centos that mix completely dissimilar poets’ lines are another harmless kind of comic invention.
THE CLERIHEW