Sharing as much poetry as possible
Featured This Week: Rondeau
Summary description:
The rondeau’s form is not difficult to recognize: as it is known and practiced today, it is composed of fifteen lines, eight to ten syllables each, divided stanzaically into a quintet, a quatrain, and a sestet. The rentrement consists of the first few words or the entire first line of the first stanza, and it recurs as the last line of both the second and third stanzas. Two rhymes guide the music of the rondeau, whose rhyme scheme is as follows (R representing the refrain): aabba aabR aabbaR.
Where the rentrement appears in its traditional French form, it typically does not adhere to the rhyme-scheme--in the interest of maintaining the line’s buoyancy and force. But when nineteenth-century English poets adopted the rondeau, many saw (or heard) the rentrement as more effective if rhymed and therefore more assimilated into the rest of the poem.
— "Rondeau: Poetic Form", Poets.org
Write or recommend some poetry using this form in the comments or as top-level posts this week!
What are your favorite things about rondeaus? Do you like to do new and interesting things with them? Are there alternative descriptions or variations you like better than this one? What are your favorites to read?
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My favourite rondeau is John McCrae's In Flanders Fields. In Canada, we recite it every November 11 for Remembrance Day, and I've never gotten sick of it.
I've written a couple of rondeaus lately, and posted them on my blog. It's not an easy form to write, but it is a lot of fun and I find it lends itself to a certain sort of content, a kind of righteous anger of sorts. I should probably try to write one with a completely different topic, just to see if I can.
I've always loved that poem. It's the example rondeau everywhere for good reason.
And yours are good too! I like the ring to them. (and they do lend well to certain topics)