Fyodor Bronnikov, Pythagoreans Greeting the Rising Sun (1869). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper,
The proper instrument on which to pay
My compliments, but I should come a cropper;
Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.
—W. H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron (1937)
Think five syllables
And not the rounder six,
Move up to sublime seven
And not eight’s bag of old-time tricks,
Then nine, close-fitting buttered bricks,
Odd numbers made in Grecian heaven.
Don’t go past the boundary of eleven,
Where thirteen bloviates on an unhallowed shore,
Where even Byron stumbles, not saying any more.
The fat Fourteener crashed and broke on Missolonghi’s beach.
The ripples of that breakup may be what wrecks one's reach.
If reach there be in Quantum’s Pickup Sticks,
Another bunch of specious tricky tricks.
Hail Pythagoras!
He knew what stops are best
limitations, and the rest—
Beastly death is just a hill of beans,
poetry and life not being what they seems.
Note: Wikipedia says,
“The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the ABABABCC rhyme scheme.”
“The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is ABABBCC.”
“A fourteener is a line consisting of 14 syllables, which are usually made of seven iambic feet, for which the style is also called iambic heptameter.”
These rules might be fun to play around with, but I’m not bothered myself!
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