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.

Inside the Rhyme Machine

A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem usually in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. The shortness and strict rhyme scheme create a musical effect. This is a good form to practice because it focuses and challenges much of the poet's technical and artistic skills.

There are two main types of sonnets: the Italian (Petrarchan) and the English (Shakespearean).

The Italian sonnet has a first division (octave) of eight lines rhyming abbaabba and the second division (sestet), consisting of six lines rhyming cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave presents the narrative, states the proposition, or raises a question; the sestet brings the narrative home by making an abstract comment, applying the proposition, or solving the problem.

The English (Shakespearean) sonnet has four divisions: three quatrains (each with a rhyme-scheme of its own) and a rhymed couplet. The typical rhyme-scheme for the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet at the end is usually a commentary on the foregoing, an epigrammatic close.

Here is a Web site with a long listing of sonnet poets and their poems:

http://www.sonnets.org/alpha.htm

After reading through the poems at sonnets.org for awhile, you might find it easier to write your own.

Here is one Italian sonnet I found there written by Katharine Lee Bates:

To a Crow

Come hither, taunted bird, and I will stroke
Thy ruffled plumage with a verse, O triste
And sombre minstrel at our Twelfth Night feast,
A music masquerading in thy croak.
How often, when the wild March mornings broke,
Have I descried thee, like a demon priest,
Heaping hoarse curses on the riotous East
From the bare branches of some tossing oak!
Yet ever welcome is thy wizard flight,
--Most welcome now, when Earth lies imaging
The sleep of death beneath a winding-sheet
Of frozen snow intolerably white,
A pallid waste crossed by the sudden, fleet,
Beautiful shadow of thy sable wing.