Let Me Sing Longer

Writing a Cinquain

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A cinquain (sing-KANE) is a short, unrhymed poem. This style was named and created by Adelaide Crapsy (1878-1914) in the early 1900's. Her poems were not published until after she died.

Its form consists of 22 syllables:

First Line: a one word title (two syllables)
Second Line: a two word phrase that describes the title or you can just use two words (four syllables)
Third Line: a three word phrase that describes an action relating to the title or just actions words (six syllables)
Forth Line: a four word phrase that describes a feeling relating to the topic or just feeling words (eight syllables)
Fifth Line: one word that refers back to the title (two syllables)

The title, due to the shortness of the poem, takes on a greater weight because it is one sixth of the poem.

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Niagara, Seen on a Night in November
by Adelaide Crapsy

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

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Moon Shadows
by Adelaide Crapsy

Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.

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Amaze
by Adelaide Crapsy

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

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Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about reading her poetry and to honor her memory.

Adelaide Crapsey
by Carl Sandburg

Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.

And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.

And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.

And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,
Let me sing longer,
Only a little longer.

And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.