The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (39 page)

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
,

T
HE 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 end-refrain 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:

T
HE 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.

R
ONDEL

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 thirteen-line 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.

R
OUNDEL

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.

R
ONDELET

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.

R
OUNDELAY

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.

T
RIOLET

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: