The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

TRIOLETThis TRIOLET of my designIs sent with all my heart to you,Devotion dwells in every line.This triolet of my designIs not so swooningly divineAs you, my darling Valentine.This triolet of my designI 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 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.