So who had fun with the bop last month? Didn’t quite get the poem you were hoping for? Want to try it again? Well, we’re upping the difficulty level a little this month with the rondeau.
Like the bop, the rondeau is essentially a “song” form of poetry, so I hope you’ve got your imaginary band name ready to step into, your skinny jeans appropriately shredded, and your moto boots on. (My band is Ammonia Hellscape, named after the third floor of 24 Sussex.)
Just kidding: it was developed in 13th century France, and nobody had figured out moto boots yet. And they were more into braies and cottes than skinny jeans and tees. But they definitely had roaming bands of indie troubadours playing the coffeeshops and courtesaneries, and they were just as melancholy as today’s indie bands.
Thematically, the rondeau was a sad song, dealing with courtship woes, the changing of seasons, spiritual worship, and other intense emotions. Maybe sad isn’t the right word; melancholy was closer. Bittersweet longing characterizes these songs.
On the other hand, nobody can be sad all the time, so the last stanza often flipped the script, leaving the listener with a cheerful – or at least not bleak – c’est la vie! A modern rondeau can be playful, nonsensical, melancholy- whatever strikes your fancy. One famous rondeau by Frank O’Hara begins with this mysterious directive: “Door of America, mention my fear to the cigars.”
Like the bop, the rondeau is built around a single repeating line, the refrain. Unlike the bop, the refrain is taken from another line of the poem – it can be the entire line or just a portion thereof. The refrain doesn’t have to rhyme with the rest of the poem, but you should think carefully and make a deliberate choice whether to break the flow of the poem with an unrhymed line or whether you’d prefer to keep the lyrics moving along.
Before I inflict all the rules of the rondeau on you, let’s look at one of my favorites. As you read through the rules, come on back to this poem and see if you can spot how the author, John McCrae, applied them:
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Let’s get down to the nitty gritty:
Structure
The rondeau has fifteen lines, broken into a quintet (five lines), a quatrain (four lines) and a sestet (six lines). Before you set out to write these lines, though, you’ll need to make some choices.
Syllable count
Except for the refrain, each line must have the same number of syllables, and this can be either eight or ten. That is, if your first line has eight syllables, so must every other line (again, except for the refrain; we’ll get to this in a minute).
Scansion
There’s quite a few resources available on how to scan a poem. Obviously, I like mine, but this video is also really helpful. I like that they read the poem “casually” as well as carefully; many videos on scansion don’t, and honestly you can FORCE words to sound like they scan if you’re reading them aloud with spaced syllables and you already know where the stresses need to be.
Look, I’m not here to tell you that you should probably master iambic pentameter, but life gets a lot easier once you have the hang of it. Writing a rondeau in iambic pentameter gives you lines with ten syllables that all scan with each other, and will set up a comfortable pattern for the refrain.
With that said.
No, there’s no absolute requirement that you write your rondeau in iambic pentameter. Confession: I really hate iambic pentameter. Iambic tetrameter, eight syllables and four iambs, is more my jam. But you can throw in all the trochees, anapests and dactyls you like, so long as all your lines match and all of them have the same number (8 or 10) of syllables.
Rhyme
Nobody likes to write the same post fifty times, so if you just read that sonnet post on scansion bear with me as I cut and paste a little, ok?
I’m assuming everyone knows how to rhyme.
For a rondeau, again the words that you need to make rhyme are at the end of each line. (You may also want to consider an internal rhyme if your refrain will be a partial line – more on that in a second.) If you’re struggling to find a rhyme, there are some great resources online to help you find words.
When we discuss rhyming in poetry, we assign each sound that has to be rhymed a letter, in the order it appears in the poem. For example:
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
The first line ends in “fet” so we’ll assign the letter A to “fet.” The next line ends in “fet” too, so the rhyme scheme so far is A/A. The third line, though, ends in a long “a” sound. That’s our B rhyme, and the “der” in the fourth and fifth lines is C. The last line goes back to the long “a” and is another B. Still with me?
The poem all together has the rhyme scheme AAB CCB. One easy way to see this is by putting the letter at the end of each line:
Little Miss Muffet (A)
Sat on a tuffet, (A)
Eating her curds and whey; (B)
Along came a spider, (C)
Who sat down beside her (C)
And frightened Miss Muffet away. (B)
Before we delve into the rhyme scheme for your rondeau, however, we need to talk about….
The refrain
“Refrain,” besides meaning to stop oneself from taking an action, means a recurring phrase (words or tones) in a musical work. In a rondeau, we see the refrain appear a total of three times. It’s all or part of the first line of the poem, and then it is the last line of the second and third stanzas.
Let’s go back to “In Flanders Fields” for a minute. The first line reads “In Flanders fields the poppies grow[.]” McCrae could have used that entire line as the refrain, but he chose not to. Instead, the next two stanzas end with “In Flanders fields.”
Breaking up the rhymes with that short line creates a pause, a musical caesura that halts the reader like a stopping heartbeat. In fact, McCrae’s use of iambic tetrameter for the rest of the poem sets up that “heartbeat” since iambs are almost a perfect mirror for the sound of a human heart. This is a great example of when not to use a rhyming line.
Another way to deal with the refrain, if you want it to rhyme but don’t want to use the entire first line of your poem, is to have an internal rhyme somewhere in that line. For example, McCrae could have said “In Flanders, low….”
Back to rhymes!
Now that we understand how to annotate rhymes and how the refrain works, let’s put it all together. I’m going to get a little bit fancy and use (R) for the refrain here, ok?
The first stanza is a quintet, five lines: (R/A)ABBA (This means that the first line will end with an A rhyme and either contain or be the refrain.)
The second stanza is a quartet: AABR
End with your sestet: AABBAR (see how this looks just like the first verse with the refrain tacked on at the end?)
As you can see, the trick is picking an A and a B sound that have a crapton of rhymes. Don’t pick month, or purple, or orange, or silver, is what I mean. You’ll be in a lot of trouble.
Applying all those rules:
Now that we know how to Do The Thing, let’s take a look at Flanders Fields again:
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
OK. So each line has 8 syllables or 4 iambs. That means we’re in iambic tetrameter, my favorite. Somewhere in that first line is the refrain. Our “A” rhyme sound is “oh” and our “B” sound is “ai” and the rhyme scheme here is AABBA.
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Here’s our quartet. We’re still in iambic tetrameter except for the last line, the refrain. Now we can see that McCrae used only part of his first line as the refrain, so our rhyme scheme is AABR. If the refrain had been the whole first line, the scheme would have looked like AABA; another way to do it would have been to put a B sound in that line so that the refrain made a B rhyme, giving you AABB. Confused yet?
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
And here’s the closing sestet, rhyming AABBAR. Notice that McCrae has made a thematic change here from the sad tone of the first two stanzas to a more positive inspirational third stanza, truly making this a classic rondeau.
Think you’re up to it? Got a bop that didn’t quite dance to the beat? Try reworking it into a rondeau this month. Be brave: the poetry grid won’t be moderated, so you won’t get a love letter. If you need a pair of eyes on your poem and you’re a member, you can still use your editorial reviews. Just send me a note at rowan@yeahwrite.me and I’ll be happy to help you spend those membership benefits!
