Lesson 1: Using Form and Meter
Models: See below for Octave, Sestina, and Sonnet; additional model, “The Road Not Taken”
Rhyme scheme:
Meter:
Scan:
Iamb:
Pentameter:
Assignment: Write a poem that follows a specific form. Choose a Rhymed Octave, Sestina, Sonnet, or
another clear rhyme scheme like in “The Road Not Taken”. This poem will be due at the beginning of
the period on Monday.
Option 1: Rhymed Octave a/a/b/b/c/c/d/d
“Nothing Gold Can Stay”
Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
*Starter Idea: Frost uses an image from nature as a metaphor to represent a bigger idea.
Option 2: Sestina
A fixed form consisting of six 6-line (usually unrhymed) stanzas in which the end words of the
first stanza recur as end words of the following five stanzas in a successively rotating order and
as the middle and end words of each of the lines of a concluding envoi in the form of a tercet.
The usual ending word order for a sestina is as follows:
Stanza A, 1- 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6
Stanza B, 6 - 1 - 5 - 2 - 4 - 3
Stanza C, 3 - 6 - 4 - 1 - 2 - 5
Stanza D, 5 - 3 - 2 - 6 - 1 - 4
Stanza E, 4 - 5 - 1 - 3 - 6 - 2
Stanza F, 2 - 4 - 6 - 5 - 3 – 1
Stanza G-Concluding tercet:
middle of first line - 2, end of first line - 5
middle of second line - 4, end of second line - 3
middle if third line - 6, end of third line - 1
“Sestina”
Elizabeth Bishop
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
*Starter Idea: Bishop chooses 6 strong nouns. Pick out your words first. Sometimes it’s a
little easier if you pick words that can be used in two ways (for example, hide can be a verb,
but it can also be a noun, as in an animal’s skin).
Option 3: Sonnet: A Shakespearean, or English, sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line containing
ten syllables and written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unstressed syllable
followed by a stressed syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean
sonnet is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g; the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date,
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
*Starter Idea: Though many sonnets are about love, yours doesn’t have to be. It could be about
adventures ahead of you, people you haven’t met yet, or people in your life in a non-romantic way.
Yours doesn’t have to use such formal language, either. It’s an old form, but you can make it modern
with your word choice.
Option 4: Create a rhyme scheme of your own. Be sure that it’s consistent and that
your lines have roughly the same meter/number of syllables.
The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
*Starter Idea for a poem with a deliberate rhyme scheme of your choosing: Write a
poem that is an extended metaphor using an image from nature. Try to make it a
metaphor for something you have to go through in life: decision making, loss of
innocence, gaining wisdom, taking risks, failing and trying again, etc. Frost doesn’t
stop at saying a fork in the road is a metaphor for a choice. He describes each choice
and shares his feelings about making the choice.