Welcome!  This is Frank Hubeny. The form today is one that Ladyleemanila (https://ladyleemanilablog.wordpress.com/2017/05/18/remember-this-one-lovely-lonely-soul/) used in a poem linked in our last Open Link Night. The form is called “ottava rima”. I didn’t see any previous reference to it at dVerse Poets Pub so let’s give it a try.

Ottava rima is an old Italian form consisting of multiple stanzas each of eight lines using iambic meter and having the rhyme pattern abababcc.

Two very famous poems, among many others, were written in ottava rima: Lord Byron’s Don Juan and William Butler Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium.

Here is Tom O’Bedlam reciting some excerpts from the first canto of Don Juan in SpokenVerse’s YouTube video channel.

Here is Tom O’Bedlam reciting the four stanzas of Yeat’s more serious poem also in SpokenVerse’s channel.

Although one can go on and on indefinitely with ottava rima stanzas, for this challenge let’s limit the number of stanzas to four or less. One stanza would do. It can be on any topic you want.

Here’s the procedure.

• Write your ottava rima poem of 1 to 4 stanzas,
• post it on your blog and
• put the link to your blog post in the Mister Linky below.
• Comment below if you have linked something or have some question about ottava rima. I may not know the answer but it will be fun to try to find one.
• And don’t forget to read and comment on the other poems that others have linked. We all get to know each other better that way.