Dwelling on the Triolet (not to be confused with the toilet).

French words are like the flamingoes of linguistic taxonomy: ostentatious, gangling, and generally more appealing to the eye than the ear.  Of course, this comes from someone who, like dear Alice, would struggle to wield such words with the minimal finesse required of a croquet mallet.

Nevertheless, the word triolet doesn't bother me at all. As the name of an obscure but lovely poetic form, it has captured my heart as so many French things manage to do, in spite of the smell and the attitude.

A Triolet is defined as, "a poem of eight lines, typically of eight syllables each, rhyming abaaabab and so structured that the first line recurs as the fourth and seventh and the second as the eighth" (The New Oxford American Dictionary).

The most exceptionally hilarious instance of this form is by Frances Cornford (1886-1960):

To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?

So much, indeed. I have always been glad that poetry can express the ridiculous, the humorous, and not simply the serious. Often the diverging impulses must blend. As Chesterton has noted, “He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”

Before I discovered the "tragedy in [my] heart," I turned to verse merely as a way to communicate, for example, the murder of clowns, or the demise of Santa Claus, or the death of overly zealous lumberjacks--and naturally the verse itself was poor (to say nothing of the content). Now, of course, I am glad to understand (that is, stand under) a better, though perhaps not complete, distinction between verse and poetry. As Aristotle has observed, "The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it." 

Poetry, by contrast, is not just a medium, but a kind of verbal Tao, submitted to by its practitioners, and able to instruct and to receive all the ridiculous, noble, profound, and playful aspects of human experience without regarding them as exclusive nor vilifying any sincere attempt to follow its tenets.

Human beings, unfortunately, are not so kind, and perhaps they cannot be. Just as the qualities of Love itself will be superior to the qualities of its disciples; the disciples of poetry cannot fully express the nature of poetry itself. It is a comfort for lousy poets like myself.

Poetry, then, if I can stay on my literary cloud for a moment longer, is a kind of spiritual discipline which trains one, not it the perfection of its forms, but in the perfection of one's heart. I wish more of us practiced it, perhaps even daily, even if we are terrible at it (and we generally are), that we might begin to shed the impulse merely to produce poems of merit and take on the poetic mind, through which our reality is justly discovered.

With that, I freely admit that my own insecurity leaves me, at present, to share only the more flippant of efforts in this Tao. Thus your reward (or penalty) for enduring my disorganized effusion is my own attempt at satisfying the conditions of the Triolet. Hopefully you know your Shakespeare.

Sadly, Not to Be

Dear Hamlet was a happy man—
A shame that he should die!
Ophelia never gave a damn,
Yet Hamlet was a happy man:
He smiled as villains, or anyone, can
And praised the pestilent sky!
Dear Hamlet was a happy man—
A shame that he should die.

 

I highly encourage you to try your own hand at this lovely little flamingo, and send them to me or post them below.