Hats – Terza Rima

   In my discovery of the different forms of poetry,  I came across the Terza Rima.  This is my first attempt using this form.  Hope it reads well.  I have included its description of the form below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it. A  bit singy-songy I fear.

 

 

I have worn several hats throughout the years;

reflecting different roles I played each day.

Subjective meanings – kept as souvenirs.

 

A feathered birthday hat inviting play;

adorned year after year with no delay –

another wish on candles if I may?

 

A mournful hat weeps sadness of betray –

A smoke-stained cap that kissed a Reggae song –

A lover’s chapeau which will never stray.

 

There was a hat I dared not keep for long;

’cause it belonged to the quick stepping cop –

who chased me for the mischief I did wrong.

 

My favorite hat sold never in a shop,

uniting words on paper to be sung:

A Poet’s hat worn ’till the last ink drop.

 

Such memories in hats when I was young,

show steps of life upon each ladder’s rung.

 

☮TheMsLvh © 2011

 

Image: Hats on Ladder image by DecoDanny courtesy Google Images

California Ink In Motion by TheMsLvh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

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Form

Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. The two possible endings for the example above are d-e-d, e or d-e-d, e-e. There is no set rhythm for terza rima, but in English, iambic pentameter is generally preferred.

History

The first known use of terza rima is in Dante’s Divina Commedia. In creating the form, Dante may have been influenced by the lyric form used by the Provençal troubadours. The three-line pattern may have been intended to suggest the Holy Trinity. Inspired by Dante, other Italian poets, including Petrarch and Boccaccio, began using the form.

The first English poet to write in terza rima was Geoffrey Chaucer, who used it for his Complaint to His Lady. Although a difficult form to use in English because of the relative paucity of rhyme words available in a language which has, in comparison with Italian, a more complex phonology, terza rima has been used by Milton, Byron (in his Prophecy of Dante) and Shelley (in his Ode to the West Wind and The Triumph of Life). Thomas Hardy also used the form of meter in ‘Friends Beyond’ to interlink the characters and continue the flow of the poem. A number of 20th-century poets also employed the form. These include Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, Andrew Cannon, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, Clark Ashton Smith, James Merrill, Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur. [Information source :Wikipedia]