Poetic Forms: Climbing Rhyme

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to week four of poetic forms, where every week I introduce a different type of poem and invite you to give it a go! As an added incentive to take part, the best poem every week is featured on the Writing Gooder blog on Sunday afternoon, alongside a brief analysis by myself.

To enter a poem, make sure it’s written in this week’s style and then either post a link to it in a comment below, or post the full text of the poem.

Climbing Rhyme

When choosing which poem to show to you this week, I had in the back of my mind the idea of a Triolet or a Sestina, but while browsing the internet I came across a form with I hadn’t tried before: the Climbing Rhyme.

This is a form of Burmese poetry and I was immediately enchanted by the unexpected and captivating use of internal rhymes to knit a poem together. Much of what I have researched about the form has come from a description by Larry Gross and so it seems fitting that I use his creation as my example:

Each in His Time

Larry Gross (1953-1984)

Living’s merely the stage
untutored actors age on–
nothing sage, nothing profound
happens, only drowned emotions
some uncrowned king inside
continues to hide, refuses
to stride the world
unfettered, flag unfurled against
fate’s hurled arrows, cannot
invent his plot, must
speak what is penned
for him, suspend himself,
amend, pretend until he
becomes someone free, someone
striding Galilee, crowned messiah
in a world he never meant to be.

How to do it

Traditionally the poem’s lines would be four syllables in length, but Gross, in his adoption of the form in English poetry, decides instead on four words per line.

It is Gross’ adaptation which we are covering today, but if you would like to write the poem in its traditional sense, simply replace every instance of ‘word’ with syllable instead, so the lines will be four syllables long and they will rhyme on every fourth, third and second syllable.

The poem follows an internal rhyming pattern of 4, 3, 2 where the author must rhyme on the fourth (and final) word of the first line, then again on the third word of the second line and once more on the second word of the third line. In addition to this, the fourth word of the third line then starts the pattern off again by rhyming with the third word of the fourth line and so on.

Here are the rhymes picked out in a section of Gross’ poem:

Living’s merely the stage
untutored actors age on–
nothing sage, nothing profound
happens, only drowned emotions
some uncrowned king inside
continues to hide, refuses

The final line of the poem will often be longer, though it seems the tradition is to aim for an odd number of words so 5; 7; 9 or 11 are the options.

I’m going to have a lot of fun trying out this form of poetry and I hope you all will as well.

Good Luck Everyone!

** Image owned by Enokson at Flickr.