Moving on with the named verse form theme, here's a triolet...
( Poem #906) To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train 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?
-- Frances Cornford |
triolet: a poem or stanza of eight lines in which the first line is repeated
at the fourth and seventh and the second line as the eight with a rhyme
scheme of ABaAabAB.
The English pronunciation is tr<e>i;olet, though it is tree-o-lay in
French.
Today's poem is not particularly great, except for one thing - it makes
excellent use of the triolet form. Rather than employ the more modern custom
of attempting to vary the reading of the repeated lines, Cornford structures
the poem so that the repetition reads easily and naturally - it's not
obscured, but it doesn't need to be, since it adds to, rather than
detracts from, the poem.
As for the content of the poem, the "O fat white woman whom nobody loves"
is rather jarring to modern sensibilities; I can't imagine it being
too far otherwise even to her contemporaries. In particular, I find the
'whom nobody loves' a rather odd sort of deduction to make from a train
window, and have to wonder if it was intended as a comment on the narrator
as much as on the woman.
Like 'Trees', like 'The Ballad of the Tempest', today's poem has just that
combination of popular and annoying qualities that make it almost guaranteed
to attract parodies. Chesterton was moved to reply on the woman's behalf:
Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much.
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves and such?
-- Chesterton, 'The Fat White Woman Speaks'
(c. 1933); an answer to Frances Cornford.
and Housman skewered the poem rather neatly:
O why do you walk through the fields in boots,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody shoots,
Why do you walk through the fields in boots,
When the grass is soft as the breast of coots
And shivering-sweet to the touch?
-- Housman; see [broken link] http://vp.engl.wvu.edu/Fall98/burnett.htm for the rest
of the (excellent) piece on Housman's reworking of other poets' poems.
On Triolets:
Like most of the repeated line verse forms, triolets are influenced rather
heavily by the constraint. Unlike the villanelle, however, the poem itself
is short enough that the repetition can be worked with, rather than
around, a lot more easily (though workarounds are, of course, popular,
from the shifting of punctuation and parts of speech to the use of
homophones and homonyms, taking advantage of the fact that the repeated
lines merely have to *sound* identical).
Here are some essays on the triolet:
Going back at least to the thirteenth century, triolets are short,
usually witty poems, just perfect for tucking into a box of candy or
some flowers. Its name comes from the repetition of the key line three
times (French "tri").
-- [broken link] http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/triolet.html
[broken link] http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/henley01.html is a
self-referential triolet
[broken link] http://pub4.ezboard.com/fthesonnetboardnotsonnets.showMessage?topicID=343.topic
is another amusingly self-referential piece about the English/French
pronunciation differences (the triolet is, in general, a fun form to
play with, and popular among amateur writers of light verse).
[broken link] http://pub34.ezboard.com/fla1frm30.showMessage?topicID=2.topic is
another nice essay
The earliest English triolets were of a devotional nature composed by
Patrick Carey, a Benedictine monk, in 1651. It was reintroduced by
Robert Bridges in 1873.
-- http://www.themediadrome.com/content/articles/words_articles/right_word4_fixed_forms.htm#triolet
A brief biography of Conford:
http://www.traditional-poetry.org/cornford.htm
Minstrels Links:
Poem #84: "From a Railway Carriage", R. L. Stevenson
Poem #212: "To Alice-Sit-By-The-Hour", Franklin Adams
-martin
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