"Rhyme Scheme" Blogs & Blog Posts

Not to be confused with the Ballade. These two are entirely different poetic forms. (The ballad is easier if you ask me, but the ballade is far more elaborate.) A common ballad is composed of several ballad stazas, or quatrains (four lines) of altern...

I lost a good deal of hair writing the poem below. The square poem is just that much of a challenge, but it is worth it. A square poem has no fixed number of lines or stanzas, so in that sense it’s free-form, but it does follow a strict alterna...

First of all, it has a cute name. Novelinee. Tee hee. The novelinee is a nine-line single stanza that may be written in iambic pentameter, or at least in decasyllabic lines (ten syllables). It follows the rhyme scheme ABABCDCDD. The novelinee may be...

This is why I love the Brisbane sonnet: I’ve never heard of it before. Sure, we all know of Shakespearean sonnets or Petrarchans or Elizabethans—but what the heck is a Brisbane sonnet? A Brisbane sonnet, like every sonnet, has 14 lines; the diffe...

So, I was reading through Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” (which I am loving, by the way, and of which I am an avid fan), and I happened across a chapter where Madame Morrible introduced a rather foreign poetic form called the Quell. Ess...

Yes, dear readers, there is a difference between a ballad and a ballade (I certainly didn’t know that) — the difference being: One is harder, the other not. But then again, difficulty is subjective. I shall discuss the ballad in a future...

I must admit, the kyrielle is pretty okay a poetic form. It’s one of the few thematically flexible on the blog thus far. A kyrielle is written in quatrains — as to the number of stanzas, it is to the poet’s discretion but three is u...