NaPoWriMo Day 4
A Star of Light
My First Triolet
Glamour is purified beyond falsehood’s door.
A star of light shines brightly evermore.
Love will soon restore.
Glamour is purified beyond falsehood’s door.
Pride can be perverse.
But humility is there to redress.
Glamour is purified beyond falsehood’s door.
A star of light shines brightly evermore.
“A triolet is an eight-line poem. All the lines are in iambic tetramenter (for a total of eight syllables per line), and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines. This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet. Beyond this, there is a tight rhyme scheme (helped by the repetition of lines) — ABaAabAB.”
Triolets were in vogue among the Victorians — all those repetitions can add a sort of melancholy gravitas to a poem, but watch out! They can also make the poem sound oddly gong-like. A playful, satirical poem, on the other hand, can be easily written in the triolet form, especially if you can find a way to make the non-repeating lines slightly change the meaning of the repeated ones.
