To quote a line from Emily Dickinson’s epithetical poem “March is scarcely here” yet for many of us in the cold northern Hemisphere, that means Spring has begun (though some set the season by the later vernal equinox). Anyhow, Christina Rossetti’s eponymous poem paints that sense of rejuvenation we begin to feel:
“When life’s alive in everything,
Before new nestlings sing,
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back}
Along the trackless track –
God guides their wing,
He spreads their table that they nothing lack, –“ [more]
And Alice Oswald’s’ “A Short Story of Falling” employs nature as metaphor for themes of transience, transformation and renewal so apt for this season. She writes in couplets of perfect rhyme:
“It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower and every flower a tiny tributary that from the ground flows green and momentary is one of water's wishes and this tale hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of grass...”
One flower that epitomises this turn of the season is The Snowdrop, wonderfully wrought by Ted Hughes in couplet lines of half rhymes:
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
And so for today’s MTB prompt we are writing in two lines stanzas as rhyming couplets thus:
Poetry Rules:
- Write at least 12 lines of poetry in couplets
- separate the poem into couplets of 2 line stanzas
- the couplets must rhyme but only using half or para rhymes [see examples below]
Poetry Options:
- write about a specific or imaginary couple written from the perspective of they or we
- or choose the notion of two as a topic
Why Use Half/Para rhymes: Because it avoids using an obvious pattern. It can connect words and phrases in new ways as well as sound musical without over-powering the content like perfect rhymes sometimes do.
Some Examples: Pararhyme – the word was coined by the poet Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) – is sometimes called partial rhyme or imperfect rhyme. It can be distinguished from half-rhyme.
- para rhymes: same start & end consonants – hall/hell; stirred/stared; escaped/scooped;
- half rhymes: same end consonants – alive/move; lame/come; mad/bed; hate/pot;
Once you have written and posted your poem, according to the guidelines above, do add it to Mr Linky below then go visiting and reading other contributors as that is half the fun of our dVerse gatherings.
Please also TAG dVerse in your post, or include a link at the end of your poem that leads readers back to this dVerse prompt
[N.B. Mr Linky closes Saturday 3p.m. EST]
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