Triolets — Short but not simple

Our National Poetry Month project of sending out sonnets and other daily poems prompted me to dig around in the traditional poetic forms, and I’ve been playing with a new one that is short and quite lovely, but very difficult: the triolet. Like the pantoum, a triolet takes part of its structure from the repetition of entire lines — in fact, three of its lines are repeated, so that the poet only actually has to compose five lines to write a triolet. This extreme repetition, and the fact that only two rhymes can be used in the eight-line poem, restricts the language so tightly that both poet and reader must focus on the very subtle ways in which the sound and meaning of the same words evolves line by line during the progress of the poem.

Examples of triolets in our library:
“Triolet” by Robert Bridges (1876)
“How Great My Grief” by Thomas Hardy (1901)
“The Coquette, and After” (a pair of triolets) by Thomas Hardy (1901)
Four Triolets by Sara Teasdale (1911)