I know it doesn’t feel like it today, when the Real Feel Index says that I’m sitting in a room that’s literally halfway to the boiling point of water, but summer is winding down and coming to an end. Kids are headed back to school, and for some of us (not me, thanks, just dogs) that means a few more minutes of blessed peace during the day. And you know what that means?
Yeah, we’re going to pretend like it’s “more writing time.”
For the return of the poetry slam, let’s pull out all the stops and work on a short form called the triolet (tree-oh-LAY, /ˌtriː.əˈleɪ/). Even though there are only eight lines in a triolet, it’s a great chance to work on rhyme, scansion, and even picking out a good refrain. Because it’s been a while since you wrote a poem, don’t lie, let’s take a minute for a quick refresher on how rhyme and scansion work. If you’re already the most iambic poet that ever sonneted a villanelle, skip it. For the rest of us….
Rhyme
I’m assuming everyone knows how to rhyme, so I’m going to focus on how we describe rhymes when we’re talking about poetry.
For most poetic forms, the words that you need to make rhyme are at the end of each line. (Some types of poetry have internal rhyme schemes; we’ll talk about those another time.) 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 use a specific vocabulary to do it. Using this vocabulary lets us shortcut a lot of explanations, so let’s take a few minutes to learn it. First, 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 “ay” sound, so we’ll assign that sound the letter B, and the “der” in the fourth and fifth lines is C. The last line goes back to the long “ay” so it’s another B, not a D, because it’s not a new sound even though it’s not right next to the other 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)
Scansion
What’s “scansion?” Well, poems have “meter” and scansion is the way we talk about and represent that meter visually.
Meter is the combination of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line of a poem. Meter is usually talked about in two-syllable chunks, and these chunks have all kinds of fascinating and intimidating names like “trochee” and “iamb” and “anapest” and “dactyl.” You don’t have to memorize all of these names to scan a poem, though they’re helpful in talking about what kind of scansion the poem has.
how to scan a poem
When you talk, you naturally emphasize certain syllables in your words. To scan a sentence of phrase, you just write it down and put a “/” over the syllables that are stressed, and a “u” over the unstressed syllables. Because this is a blog post and who even knows how it will line up on your screen, I’m going to just write it in the correct order and you can pretend it’s on top of the syllables. It’ll be our secret. Let’s try it:
u / u u / u u / u
There was an old mathematician,
u / u u / u u / u
Who had a profound intuition;
u / u u / u
A smart operation
u / u u / u
Called multiplication
u / u u / u u / u
Would speed up the task of addition.
Hey, wouldja look at that? We just scanned a limerick. Now check out the pattern of the stressed and unstressed syllables: the three long lines match perfectly and so do the two short ones. That’s how you know that this limerick scans properly.
There are all sorts of fancy ways to play with scansion once you’ve got the hang of it. If you’re curious about it, this article is a very accessible way to dig deeper into the options for scansion and substitutions. Or you can check out this video; sometimes it’s hard to hear if your poem scans because you can force yourself to say the syllables in the right pattern. Having someone who’s unfamiliar with your poem read it out loud is a good test!
talking about scansion
You’ve probably heard someone describe a Shakespearian sonnet as “written in iambic pentameter.” But what does that really mean?
Each named “foot” in meter takes up two or three beats, usually two. An iamb is a foot where the second beat is accented, like a heartbeat: u/, i AM, re-WARD. If you flip that around, it becomes a trochee: /u, KIT-ten, HECK no.
If you’re a musician, you’ll pick up on anapests and dactyls quickly: they’re the “triplet” versions of the iamb and trochee. Anapests are uu/ (like a galloping horse) and dactyls read /uu (like my sister falling down the front steps that I for sure totally did not push her down).
Why is it important to know the names of feet? Because the way we name types of scansion is by saying the most common foot, then a prefix for the number of feet per line, and, uh, the word meter thrown in at the end because the English language is like that, guys, sorry. So a poem that’s got five iambs per line is iambic pentameter. Iambs, penta for five, and meter. See? Not so hard.
Rhymes and Refrains
So now that we’ve had a brief refresher on rhyme and scansion, I want to take a quick second to talk about refrains. A refrain is a repeated full or partial line or phrase in a poem or song. For purposes of a triolet, the refrains are full lines and that’s going to affect how we talk about our rhymes.
When you need to talk about repeated phrases or exact-word rhymes in poetry, one way to distinguish those from regular rhymes is to use a capital letter for the repeated phrase and a small letter for the rhyme. Here’s a quick example, using an incredibly crappy poem that I’m about to write:
I don’t want
to change shoes
I don’t want
I just don’t
It’s no use
I don’t want
to change shoes
Let’s pretend that partial rhymes are the same as full rhymes. Be a better poet than me, ok?
Ordinarily we’d say that poem has the rhyme scheme ABA ABAB. Except that if you look at this poem, some of the lines are exactly the same, and other lines just rhyme. So when we write up the rhyme scheme for this poem we use capital letters to show which lines have exact matches later in the poem (refrains), and small letters to show that other lines rhyme with those refrains but are not themselves refrains: ABA abAB. See? You can still tell what rhymes with what, but you can also see at a glance that three lines are exactly the same, A, and two more match, B. Our two rogue rhyming lines are “a” and “b.”
Enough technical stuff; let’s talk about triolets
A triolet is an eight-line poem, usually in iambic tetrameter (although you can use your favorite meter instead), with two refrain lines. The triolet actually borrows one of my favorite tricks from nonfiction writing by pairing the same two lines at the beginning and end of the poem but using the space between to give them a subtly different meaning.
Let’s get a little further into the weeds on this one and look at the rhyme and refrain pattern of the triolet:
Using capital letters to indicate repeated lines, a triolet has the rhyme scheme ABaAabAB. This means you’re only writing five actual lines of poetry and recycling them to end up with eight lines.
Let’s look at an example from Thomas Hardy which purely by coincidence anticipates my favorite season (I’m really really tired of summer, ok?):
Birds At Winter
Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house. The flakes fly! – faster
Shutting indoors the crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The Flakes fly faster
And all the berries now are gone!
The two refrains are “Around the house the flakes fly faster” (A) and “And all the berries now are gone” (B). Do you see how at the beginning of the poem the lines feel almost restful, where by the end they signal some distress on the part of the bird-narrator? And the extra repetition of A in the middle of the poem, with almost a third meaning? Yeah, that’s great stuff, that is.
If you’re following along for the advanced scansion lesson, Hardy also takes advantage of some metric substitutions. The poem is generally in iambic tetrameter, as you can see from “and all the berries now are gone” but he uses dactyls (among other tricks) in places like “shutting indoors the crumb-outcaster.” Unless you’re very comfortable with your scansion, it’s probably a good idea to stick with a more conventional meter throughout.
Here’s another triolet example, by A.E. Stallings, which demonstrates how breaking away from iambic tetrameter can help change the feel of the triolet. Stallings doesn’t use substitutions, and I think you’ll agree that they’re unnecessary:
Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
The refrains are “Why should the Devil get all the good tunes” (A) and “The booze and the neon and Saturday night” (B). You can see that the other a rhymes are spoons and afternoons, and the other b rhyme is spite.
Advanced scansion note: look at how the lines scan [u/ uu/ uu/ uu/] with an iamb and three anapests.
Just give me the quick-and-dirty version
Okay. For those folks with math-brain, here’s the TL;dr.
A triolet has eight lines. They can be any length and meter as long as they are all the same length and meter.
The first and last two lines are the same, and the fourth line is the same as the first line.
The rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB. That is, the first, third, fourth, fifth and seventh lines rhyme with each other, and the second, sixth and eighth lines rhyme with each other.
That’s the checklist I use when I’m looking at form. Now the challenge is content. The content of the poem needs to work with the lines of the refrain in such a way that while lines 1 and 2 have the same words as line 7 and 8, the context in which those lines are presented gives them a different weight or emotion. That’s the real challenge of the triolet, not the pure mechanics of it.
Good luck, and good writing!
let’s try that again, this time with feeling
t’s been a couple weeks and it looks like folks are still struggling with this form. That’s totally ok; it’s a tricky one, and it’s on me to teach it clearly. So here’s another attempt at a checklist that might work better for you if you’re still not sure you’ve got it right:
- every line must have the same number of syllables. Usually 8.
- the lines should have emphasized syllables falling in the same place as every other line. Usually on beats 2,4,6, and 8.
- ^^^ those two lines are about scansion: check the scansion pulldown if you’re still confused.
- lines 1, 4 and 7 are exactly the same.
- lines 2 and 8 are exactly the same.
- lines 3 and 5 rhyme with line 1 but are not the same.
- line 6 rhymes with line 2 but is not the same.
- ^^^ those four criteria are about rhyme and form, that AB a A ab AB thing.
