Tercets
Links References
Examples
Michael P. Garofalo
Links and References
Breathing
By Peter Davidson
La
charnière: Entre Quatrains et Tercets 10K
Cuttings: Haiku and Short Poems Links, Guides, References, Index.
600K. Author index, title index, guide
to teaching haiku poetry, classical Japanese haiku masters, concrete poetry
directory, quotes about poetry,
tercets, and selected haiku, tercets, and short poems by Michael P. Garofalo.
Dante:
The Divine Comedy 80K. Victoria S. Poulakis.
"Translation: What Difference Does it Make?"
Dante's Inferno: Translations By Joan Taber
Altieri. 53K. "Dante uses hendecasyllabic meter based on
the
magic number three, which represents the Trinity, and multiples of three:
in particular, three-squared, which
represents Beatrice, and three times ten, the symbol of perfection, or God.
There are thirty-three syllables per
tercet and three metrical units per line, nine per tercet. The rhyme scheme (ABA
BCB CDC, etc.) is Dante's
own invention, and has the effect of bringing the action of the poem forward
like a gently rolling wave folding
over into itself, weaving it into a huge, complex net:
transmogrify just one tercet, and the rhythm and flow
are interrupted, unsettling the tercets that follow."
Dark Night of the Soul
By Ronald L. Ecker. 12K.
From
100 Poems Richard
Bear
Glossary
Articles from Sol Magazine
Beth Gylys.
Villanelles.
Haiku Index 120K+
Comprehensive title index to haiku websites and selected books.
History of
Haiku. Ten haikuists and their works from Basho to
Koi. By Ryu Yotsuya.
Poetic
Forms: The Villanelle By Conrad Geller.
16K. Definition and three poems.
Poetic References - Word of
the Week: Terza Rima
Renga
- Linked Forms, Links from DMOZ Most English language Renga
verse consists of
alternating tercets and couplets, by different authors, linked together by
agreed upon rules.
Short Verse Definitions and Guidelines By Dennis M.
Garrison. Templar Phoenix Literary Review Short
Verse Guidelines. 5K. "Tercets are three-line poems,
rhymed or unrhymed, of various meters. An Enclosed Tercet
is three lines rhymed A-B-A. A Sicilian Tercet is three lines of iambic
pentameter rhymed A-B-A."
Specific
Line Group Types Brown University Women Writers
Project. 12K. "A tercet is a group of three lines
that
clearly stands as a compositional unit. Tercets can be stanzas: the villanelle,
for example, is a fixed-form type of poem
made up of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. They can also be sub-units of
larger units such as strophes and
verse paragraphs. Often, for example, tercets rhyming AAA will be interspersed
throughout a poem that is
primarily in couplets."
Stanzas and Stanzaic Form
Expansive Poetry & Music Online: Prosody. 31K.
Definitions and examples.
Tercet and Triad
By John Hewitt. 14K. "The tercet (enclosed tercet) is a poetry form with Italian
roots. One
of the most famous examples of the tercet form is Dante's The
Divine Comedy, which, in it's original form, was
composed of three line
stanzas, the first and third of which rhymed. This is the classic form of
a tercet: a
three- lined poem stanza in which the first and last lines rhyme
while the second line is blank (unrhymed)."
Tercets: Definition By Damon McLaughlin.
5K. "If your writing a poem that is made up entirely of
tercets,
then they should behave in the same manner as a poem made up of couplets,
evocative and somewhat
self-contained. If not (perhaps you're writing a sonnet), then the tercet
becomes a cog in a wheel, necessary
to the functioning of the poem."
Tercets - Examples
(Poems featuring three line stanzas in an unrhymed
free verse style.)
A. R. Ammons, The City Limits
A. R. Ammons, From Sphere
A. R. Ammons, Motion's Holding
Michael Anania, The Edge of Autumn
W. H. Auden, Archaeology
W. H. Auden, A Thanksgiving
Billy Collins, An
Introduction to Poetry
Robert Creeley, The Window
Peter Davidson, Breathing
Room
James Dickey, Buckdancer's Choice
Morgan Gibson, Searching
for Dawn
June Jordan, Nobody Riding the Roads Today
Alfred Kreymborg, The Ditty the City Sang
Philip Larkin, Forget What Did
Denise Levertov, Pleasures
Denise Levertov, September
1961
John Masefield, A Consecration
Robert Pinsky, Essay on Psychiatrists
Robert Pinsky, The Living
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Sylvia Plath, Fever 103º
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
Mark Doty, A
Display of Mackerel
Craig Raine, In Modern Dress
Anne Sexton, Wanting to Die
Louis Simpson, American Poetry
William Stafford, Christianite
Wallace Stevens, The Auroras of Autumn
Wallace Stevens, Montrachet-Le-Jardin
Wallace Stevens, Not
Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
Wallace Stevens, Repetitions of a Young Captain
Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
Mark Strand, Eating Poetry
Lucien Stryk, Bells of Lombardy
Lucien Stryk, The Duckpond
Lucien Stryk, A Sheaf for Chicago
Lucien Stryk, Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu
James Tate, The Lost PIlot
James Tate, A Wedding
Louis Untermeyer, Long Feud
Derek Walcott, Codicil
Roberta Hill Whiteman, Star Quilt
Richard Wilbur, The Writer
Tercets - Examples
(Poems featuring three line stanzas in an rhymed
free verse style.)
Jon Stallworthy, Mother
Tongue
Wallace Stevens, Oak Leaves Are Hands
Wallace Stevens, Sea Surface Full of Clouds
Donald Justice, In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert
Boardman Vaughn
Terza Rima 5K
Terza
Rima by Adrienne Rich 13 poems by Adrienne Rich.
Terza
Rima By Alberto Ríos. 17K. "Terza
Rima is a poetic rhyme scheme which involve interlocking rhymes,
written in iambic tercets. The rhyme scheme is aba bcb cdc ded (and so forth)
for as long as the poet wishes
to continue. Although no specific line length is required, most terza rima poems
in English are written in
iambic pentameter. If other line lengths are used, such as tetrameter, all lines
must be in that length."
Terza Rima - Examples
W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror - Antonio
Boccaccio, Amorosa Visione
Lord Byron, Prophecy of Dante
Geoffrey Chaucer, Complaint to His Lady
Dante, Divine Comedy
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, Part II
Robert Frost, Acquainted
with the Night
Archibald MacLeish, Conquistador
Petrarch, I Trionfi
Janan Platt, Woman
- A Terza Rima
Adrienne Rich, Terza
Rima
E. A. Robinson, House on the Hill
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelly, The Triumph of Life
Richard Wilbur, First Snow in Alsace
William Carlos Williams, Yachts
Terza Rima - Links from DMOZ/Google
Triple–Rhyming in
Dante's Inferno By Seth
Zimmerman. 22K. "What we label a triple–rhyme
scheme,
and usually visualize as an interlocking geometric pattern, is merely a static
outline— an afterimage—of
a dynamic thrust which carries the poet, his guides, and us, through the poem."
Villanelle
By Alberto Ríos. 26K. "The villanelle carries a pattern
of only two rhymes, and is marked most
distinctively by its alternating refrain, which appears initially in the first
and third lines of the opening tercet. In
all, it comprises five tercets and a concluding quatrain. Before the
villanelle was made literary by the French
in the late 1500s, it existed as a villanella, "an old Italian folk song
with an accompanying dance."
The
Villanelle - Forms By Trevor
Przyuski. "The villanelle
(French word meaning "rustic song") is a
poetry form adopted by the French in the late 16th Century from earlier forms of
Italian folk verse. The form
consists of five "tercets" (three line stanzas) and a quatrain in
which the first and last line of the first stanza
are repeated as closing lines in each stanza that follows. The
repetitious, circular movement of the form is
said to represent the circles of French folk dances."
Villanelle
- Links from DMOZ/Google
Villanelles - Examples
W. H. Auden, Villanelle
Sondra Ball, Villanelle
Elizabeth Bishop, One
Art
William Empson, Slowly the Poison the Whole Bloodstream
Fills
Barry Franklin, Changing
Clouds
Nicholas Gordon, Villanelles
for Free
Beth Gylys, Villanelles
Donald Justice, Villanelle
at Sundown
Trevor Przyuski, The
Cat
E. A. Robinson, Vilanelle
of Change
Peter Schaeffer, One
Drunken Night
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Selected Tercets
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and
low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow.
- Percy Shelly, Ode to the West Wind
I caught a petal fallen from cherry tree in my hand.
Opening the fist
I find nothing there.
- Kyoshi
Takahama
His question is complete because it contains
His utmost statement. It is his own array,
His own pageant and procession and display.
- Wallace Stevens, Questions are Remarks
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
- Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
- Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird, 1923
That was their
business. As far as he was concerned
Suffering was life's penalty: wisdom armed one
Against madness; speech was temporary; poetry was truth.
- Robert Pinsky, Essay on Psychiatrists
Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors dreams.
- Basho
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
- Theodore Roethke, The Waking
Long, look long and
you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.
- Sara Teasdale, Advice to a Girl
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
- E. A. Robinson, House on the Hill
Petals of
chrysanthemum
Curve in their whiteness
Under the moon.
- Hisajo Sugita
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas, Do
not go Gentle into that Good Night
Where the watch
synchronizes every thing
setting life to a metronomic rhythm,
Freedom is lost to the pendulum's swing.
- Betty Ann Whitney, Subliminal Message
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
to annihilate each decade.
- Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
Ink runs from the
corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
- Mark Strand, Eating Poetry
Moonlight slants through
The vast bamboo grove:
A cuckoo cries.
- Basho
The snow came down last
night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.
Absolute snow lies
rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.
- Richard Wilbur, First Snow in Alsace
Nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la via diritta era smarrita.
The holiest of all
holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
that air or vacuum, snow or
shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase
itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
- A. R. Ammons, The City Limits
We know of land that
looks lonely,
but isn't, of beef with hides of velveteen,
of sorrow, an eddy in blood.
- Roberta Hill Whiteman, Star Quilt
Turn back to where we
were when we began:
An unhappy people in a happy world-
Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.
- Wallace Stevens, The Auroras of
Autumn
Time oozed from my pores,
Drinking tea
I tasted the seven seas.
I saw in the mist
formed
Around me
The fatal chrysanthemum, myself.
- Shinkichi Takahashi, Collapse
The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then
- Author Unknown
I feel dead. I
feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.
- James Tate, The Lost PIlot
Deepening my grief,
snap
of a branch.
- Seishi
This is the way the world
ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- T. S. Eliot, The
Hollow Men
Short summer night.
A dewdrop
On the back of a hairy caterpillar.
- Buson
Cows are thinkers; in
rain, they chew their cud,
Musing on this world, and seem to weep.
They wade slowly through the brackish crud.
- Beth Gylys, Do Not Dive Head First
do you think that clouds can die?
what kind of heaven would they see?
I wonder how and I wonder why
- Barry Franklin, Changing Clouds
Nobody meeting on the
streets
But I rage from the crowded
overtones of emptiness.
- June Jordan, Nobody Riding the Roads Today
The buddha on the
moor;
from the end of his nose
hangs an icicle.
- Issa
As all the pigs have
turned back into men
And the sky is auspicious and the sea
Calm as a clock, we can all go home again.
- W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror
a life
confirmed
I knit my joy
with pastel yarn
- Francine Porad, On
a Wire
As little flowers,
which all the frosty night
Hung pinched and drooping, lift their stalks and fan
Their blossoms out, touched by the warm white light,
- Dante, Divine Comedy, Canto II, Line 127,
"Now I know everything! "so cries
The foolish youth. But when he sighs
Ali, I know nothing," he is wise.
- Latin epigram
O wild West Wind, thou
breath of Autumn's being,
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an Enchanter fleeing
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
While I work layers of
white on white
Canvases on which are drawn
From some past stretch of morning light.
- Betty Whitney, Morning Light
A crease, a curve, soft to sight, it lies
somewhere between a rhythm and a rhyme--
beauty clouds by accident, and surprise.
- Fra Filippo Lippi's
Eyes
The realization heavy on this balding little
head,
he sat is silence staring at the wall.
Nothing more could then be said.
- Trevor Pryuski, The
Cat
Such
a warm light, as in Greece descended
but with flying snow, not sand, along
this April ice on window frame appended.
- Vincent Katz, Understanding Objects
Frozen puddles -
the crack of axes
from four directions.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings
On the road to
Mandalay
Where the flyin' fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay.'
- Rudyard Kipling, Mandalay
This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.
- Denise
Levertov, September 1991
This world of dew
is only a world of dew -
and yet ...
- Issa
It's a kind of
self-delusion, terza rima,
As if all I need is one more rhyming word,
And I'll possess this changeless panorama
- Jacqueline Osherow, One Last Terza Rima/Italian
Train
Men marry what they need. I marry you,
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.
- John
Ciardi
Time can say nothing
but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you, I would let you know.
- W. H. Auden, Villanelle
At the club with pool and courts,
sweating on the gray carpet,
the copper woman in bike shorts,
busy like a sprocket, fit,
well not quite. When her head
weakens, her thighs remit.
- Janan Platt, Woman
- A Terza Rima
I have been one
acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light
- Robert Frost, Acquainted with the
Night
A
lovely thing to see:
through the paper window's hole,
the Galaxy.
- Issa
Musical and sweet, the villanelle,
like light reflected in a gentle rhyme,
moves to the ringing of a silver bell,
its form creating soft and tender spells.
Like the singing of distant silver chimes,
musical and sweet, the villanelle
- Sondra
Ball
Life is a downward
plunge and death is deep;
Where essence springs, earth opens to consume,
In night is born a flame that cannot keep.
- Ronald L. Ecker, Villanelle
Cricket chirp-
now
my life is clear.
- Hakuu
At heart there's
nothing, not the dread
of death. I know too many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character.
- Derek Walcott, Codicil
To which the carved stone tablets would give
rise—
Let’s say God got in over his head,
Which really shouldn’t be much of a surprise
- Jacqueline Osherow, Terza
Rima for a Sudden Change in Seasons
Old pond
frog jumps in
Splash!
- Basho
A frog floats
belly up -
dead silence.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Above the Fog
I know you cannot
come, and still I strain
To put my arms around you through the veil.
I feel as though my heart must stop with pain.
- Nicholas Gordon, Villanelles
She says: I gave my name and it was taken
I no longer have my name
I gave my word and it was broken
My words are learning
to walk on crutches
through traffic
- Adrienne Rich, Terza
Rima
No doubt the Devil
grins as a sea of ink I splatter,
Ye gods forgive my literary sins,
For the rest do not matter.
- Robert Huron
Closer, closer
to paradise
—
how cold.
- Issa
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
- Wallace Stevens, The
Snow Man
A pair of blackbirds
warring in the roses,
one or two poppies
losing their heads,
the trampled lawn
a battlefield of dolls.
- Craig Raine, In Modern Dress
In this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers.
- Issa
Lose something every
day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
- Elizabeth Bishop, One Art
By
moonlight, I found
a beaver serenely
floating, and spoke.
- Richard Bear, 100
Poems
There are perfumes fresh
like the skin of infants
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies,
— And others corrupted, rich and triumphant
That have the expanse
of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.
- Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences
This is the ascent into the self,
encountering possibility just as it
flowers into the actual.
- Peter Davidson, No
Escape
I am too pure for you or
anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern -
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expressive.
- Sylvia Plath, Fever 103°
Throw away your
wishbone,
straighten up your backbone,
stick out your jawbone and go to it.
- B. J. Palmer, As a Man Thinketh
Whatever
it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
- Louis Simpson,
American Poetry
The
sea-clouds whitened far below the calm
And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green
And in its watery radiance, while the hue
Of
heaven in an antique reflection rolled
Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea
Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.
- Wallace Stevens, Sea Surface
Full of Clouds
The False another portion sought,
The True with tediousness were fraught,
The Best could not be bought.
- Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
A solitary
crow on a bare branch —
autumn
evening.
- Basho
This cat in my lap
purring, eyes closed, ears back--
fur on my fingers.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings:
Summer
Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing.
- W. H. Auden, Archaeology
Exalted and confused.
Even in affliction - grotesque
Illnesses, poverty, ruined hopes, the world's
Rage and the body's - the most miserable.
Find in the mere
daylight and air
A miraculous daily bread. Fairy bread:
We eat and are changed. Survivors.
- Robert Pinsky, The Living
It was his story. It
would always be his story.
It followed him; it overtook him finally -
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
- Donald Justice,
In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn
Distance between the rocks,
Half the day
In shadow, is the distance
Between man who thinks
And the man
Who thinks he thinks: wait.
- Lucien Stryk, Zen: The
Rocks of Sesshu
Don't kill the fly-
it wrings
its hands, its feet.
- Issa
That scrawny cry —
It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
- Wallace Stevens
Not Ideas About the Thing
but the Thing Itself
Haiku
and Short Poems
Links, References, Guides
Short
Poems by Michael P. Garofalo
Quatrains,
Couplets, Haiku, Free Verse, Fragments
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Clichés, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,500 Quotes Arranged by Over 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments,
Ideas and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of
Mike Garofalo
Michael P. Garofalo's Poetry Notebook II
Tercets
64K, 20 March 2002, Version 1.
Distributed on the Internet since March 15, 2002.
Cuttings: Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo
