I know it’s February but…

Blah blah Valentine’s Day blah love blah sweetest poetry form blah. I’m already feeling nauseated. Hey, gang, what do you say we give the traditional sonnets a break this year, and try something else for February? As a nod to the sonnet, we’ll look at a form that has rhyme and scansion, but with a twist: this poem has a refrain, too.

So with no further ado, I present February’s poetry slam form: the kyrielle.

What’s a Kyrielle?

A kyrielle (say kee-ree-ell’) is a medieval form of poetry with a name derived from the Kýrie, a part of a Christian liturgy.

Okay, yeah, that wasn’t a really good description. Try this: in certain churches, there’s a section of the ceremony where the priest says a couple lines of prayer and then the people respond with a repeated line: Kýrie, eléison. (Lord, have mercy). It’s a little more nuanced than that (whether the mercy is general or specific, whether the line is sung or spoken, whether it’s interspersed with other specific lines) but you get the basic idea.

Out of that pattern came a form of poetry. Like the Kýrie, this form has a single refrain, or repeated line, at the end of each verse. It has a few other requirements, and we’ll get to those in just a second, but the real key to your kyrielle is going to be a memorable refrain.

The technical stuff:

I’ll say this in fancy poet-speak for folks who already know what I’m talking about, and then break it all down. So bear with me for just a second.

A kyrielle is a poem in iambic tetrameter. Each stanza is a quatrain,* ending on the same repeated line. It may have one of two rhyme schemes: 1) aabB ccbB; 2) abaB cbcB. It may have as many stanzas as you like, but no fewer than three.

If you just need a quick refresher on rhyme and scansion notation, skip to the sonnet post over here. Everyone else, hang in there. It’s been a while since I wrote a rhyme and scansion tutorial, and it’s probably time for an update. Once I’m done talking you through the basics, we’ll use them to analyze an actual kyrielle.

The breakdown:

Refrain

A refrain in poetry is exactly like a refrain, or chorus, in a song: it’s something that’s repeated throughout the poem. In the case of a kyrielle, it’s the last line of each stanza.

A good refrain can change meaning throughout the poem, despite being made up of the same words. Keep an eye out for that as you read through the examples.

Rhymes

You probably know what a rhyme is in its most basic sense: two words that end in the same sound or sounds. While some poems have complex internal rhyme schemes, for this month’s form we can relax and just focus on the end of the line.

To describe a rhyme scheme for poetry we use letters. Each letter represents a sound, and we assign them in the order the sound shows up. Then the next time we see that sound, we just use the same letter we used the first time we saw it. PLOT TWIST: if a line or word must be EXACTLY the same, use a capital letter instead of a lowercase one.

Let’s see what that looks like. I’ll go through two stanzas of a poem and assign the rhyme letters at the end of each line. Because I honestly love a good villanelle (even though I think it’s one of the hardest forms to write well), we’ll use the first two stanzas of Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Look out for repeated lines!

Do not go gentle into that good night, A
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; b
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. a

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, a
Because their words had forked no lightning they b
Do not go gentle into that good night. A

Got it? Let’s strip it down to just the last words, and add my thoughts:

night, A (“ite” is the first sound we run across. We assign it “a” tentatively. Later we’ll come back and capitalize the a.)
day; b (“ay” is the second sound, so it gets assigned “b”)
light. a (There’s that “ite” again, so we give it another “a”)

right, a (“ite” = “a”)
they b (“ay” = “b”)
night. A (“ite” is… wait. Hang on. This is exactly the same as the first line, so they both get capital letters. Anything that rhymes with them but isn’t exactly the same still gets an “a” but it stays lowercase.)

Make sense?

Okay. Now that you’ve got the basics of rhyme notation, let’s talk about how a kyrielle should rhyme. Each stanza (or verse) of a kyrielle has four lines. There are two patterns you can use. I’ll lay them out for a three-stanza poem, because that’s the shortest kyrielle you can write, but you’ll easily see how the pattern can be extended for more stanzas.

1. aabB ccbB ddbB
2. abaB cbcB dbdB

So in the first pattern, each stanza is made up of two rhyming couplets in succession. In the second pattern, the rhymes alternate. But because the last line of each stanza is always the same, your B rhyme will really get a workout, appearing in every stanza. Pick a word that’s easy to rhyme with!

Scansion

Remember how to scan a poem? No?

Scansion is a fancy way of talking about the rhythm of a poem. Each line scans in a pattern. (Or not, if you’re writing free verse.) This pattern is usually described by how many groups of feet (two- or three-beat rhythms) there are in a line.

To describe a metrical foot, you need a way to talk about stressed and unstressed syllables. So let’s look at the word “syllable” – if you were trying to write out how to say it, you’d write SIL-uh-bul. That SIL means the accent, or stress, is on the first, er, syllable. The other two syllables are unstressed. There are a lot of ways to annotate scansion, but the easiest way to do it on the computer is to use a “u” for an unstressed syllable and a “/” for a stressed one. So if you were writing the scansion for “syllable” you’d write “/uu.”

There are a LOT of metric feet, with fancy names. “/uu” is a pattern called a “dactyl.” There are dibrachs and trochees, anapests and antibrachs. There’s even a “molossus,” a pattern of three stressed syllables in a row! But the only type of metric foot you need to memorize to write a kyrielle is the “iamb.” That’s the one that sounds like a heartbeat: u/

When you’re writing in iambic meter, it doesn’t matter how many syllables each individual word has. What matters is that the line starts with an unstressed syllable and then alternates between stressed and unstressed, ending on a stressed syllable. That sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Let’s go back to that poem, and try to scan the first line.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Let’s read that aloud. What does it sound like?

Do NOT go GEN-tle IN-to THAT good NIGHT, right? or, if I were writing those syllables in scansion notation, u  /  u  /u  /u  /  u  / (I broke that up in the pattern of the words so you could see how it goes together. Even though it LOOKS like some of the words are “/u” the important thing is that when you mash the notation for the line all together it goes “u/u/u/u/u/“)

Ok. So we know it’s iambic as heck. u/ all over the place. But as I said before, “iambic” is only half the equation. Count those iambs. Five, right? That means this poem was written in iambic pentameter. Penta, five.

A kyrielle is written in iambic tetrameter, though. That means four iambs per line. When you get done writing your poem, you should be able to go back and read it out loud and hear this pattern for every line: u/u/u/u/

There’s a reason for that, actually. It’s because the poetry form came from a French song form, and most Western European music is written with 4 “beats” to a measure. Think about rock music. “and ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR…”

Putting it Together

Now that we know about refrains, rhyme, and scansion, let’s look at an actual kyrielle so that we can see how those three things fit together to make a poem. In the interest of full disclosure, if you search online you will find a lot of kyrielles that have deep defects in their construction, so I wanted to make sure we didn’t use one of those. I’m glad that folks were trying out forms they weren’t familiar with, but remember that not everything labeled “a kyrielle” fits the form well. And then, once you start getting into really good poetry, you start running into metric substitutions, which can be confusing in this kind of 101-level explanation.

So I’m going to start from scratch and make my own bad poem, which is going to have the technical precision I need to explain how a kyrielle works. As a special bonus, you know your poem is going to be better than this one, so don’t be afraid to write!

I’m going to start with one of the most famous lines written in iambic tetrameter: Come live with me and be my love. But instead of making it the first line of my poem, I’ll make it the refrain. When I’m writing a poem with a refrain, I often start with the refrain and work around it. So the first thing I need to do is check on that B rhyme and make sure I’m not getting into something I can’t get out of. Although I’m unlikely to use “baseball glove,” there are plenty of rhymes for love. So now I just need to come up with nine lines to go with my refrain.

I’ll lay out the rhyme scheme first, and then write into it. This is how it looks before I start:

a
b
a
B Come live with me and be my love

c
b
c
B Come live with me and be my love

d
b
d
B Come live with me and be my love

And this is how it looks at the end:

a I’ve chased the clouds and caught the sky
b and held horizons in my glove
a Taught gravity itself to fly.
B Come live with me and be my love

c I’ve seen the stars beneath my wings
b as galaxies wheeled by above.
c I’ve worn the planet’s rocky rings-
B Come live with me and be my love

d Unmapped, uncharted, un-outlined;
b these are the continents I rove,
d for I’ve a treasure yet to find:
B Come live with me and be my love

Okay. Well, except for the near-rhyme in the last stanza, that’s not the worst thing I’ve written, so I’m going to leave it be.

I tested the scansion by reading it out loud, and I didn’t have to make any words sound weird by shifting the em-PHASS-is to the wrong syl-LABB-ble, as my old teacher used to say. In fact, that’s a protip for you: if you can’t tell whether your poem scans properly, hand it to someone else to read out loud. If they stumble, you need to edit that spot. From “I’ve chased the clouds and caught the sky” through the last line, this poem reads u/u/u/u/ like a good little iambic tetrameter poem ought.

I left the rhyme notations so that you can see how they match up, but I’ll break that out for you here: My “a” rhyme is sky/fly; B is of course LOVE, so my little-b rhymes are glove, above and rove (that’s a near-rhyme, but I’m on deadline, forgive me? it’s not as bad as “prove” would have been). My c rhyme is wings/rings and d is outlined/find which is probably the only semi-innovative pairing in the entire poem. What? You were thinking it too.

Taken as a whole, then, this is a poem in at least three stanzas of four lines each, in iambic tetrameter, following one of the correct rhyme schemes, and with the last line of each stanza the same. It’s a kyrielle.

Your turn!

Worried?

We get it. Poetry can be a struggle. That’s why we wrote this handy guide to reading and critiquing poetry. But if you want a little more, our favorite editor (for today at least) Nate is teaching a class that will shape you up and help you rediscover the fun in poetry. It kicks off in the middle of March and runs through National Poetry Month. Check it out!

* A kyrielle can also be composed in couplets, but because the rhyme scheme is then aA, aA, aA, aA, we’re ignoring that possibility for the purposes of this poetry slam because very few people want to either write or read a poem where literally every line ends on the same sound, except as a challenge.

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me