A quintilla is a Spanish stanza of five octosyllabic lines. It employs two rhymes and no three consecutive lines may rhyme nor may it end in a couplet. The most common scheme is abaab, but abbab, aabab, ababa and aabba are also permitted. It is similar to the four-line redondilla but is distinct from the quintilla real , which contains five hendecasyllabic lines. [1]
Popular in the 15th century, [1] as a standalone poem the quintilla only evolved in the 16th century from the separation of the parts of the nine- or ten-line copla de arte menor. It originally considered a type of redondilla. The forms that begin with a couplet (aabba and aabab) were not popular on their own but do appear as the second half of the copla real. The famous poem "Fiesta de toros en Madrid" by Nicolás Fernández de Moratín uses four of the possible forms. [2]
Cancionero general , no. 481:
Cualquier prisión y dolor
que se sufra es justa cosa,
pues se sufre por amor
de la mayor y mejor
del mundo y la más hermosa
Alexandrine is a name used for several distinct types of verse line with related metrical structures, most of which are ultimately derived from the classical French alexandrine. The line's name derives from its use in the Medieval French Roman d'Alexandre of 1170, although it had already been used several decades earlier in Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne. The foundation of most alexandrines consists of two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each, separated by a caesura :
o o o o o o | o o o o o o o=any syllable; |=caesura
An epic poem, epic, epos, or epopee is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily involving a time beyond living memory in which occurred the extraordinary doings of the extraordinary men and women who, in dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants, the poet and his audience, to understand themselves as a people or nation.
In poetry, enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped.
Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
A limerick is a form of verse, usually humorous and frequently rude, in five-line, predominantly anapestic meter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth line rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme. The following example is a limerick of unknown origin:
The Romaunt of the Rose is a partial translation into Middle English of the French allegorical poem, le Roman de la Rose. Originally believed to be the work of Chaucer, the Romaunt inspired controversy among 19th-century scholars when parts of the text were found to differ in style from Chaucer's other works. Also the text was found to contain three distinct fragments of translation. Together, the fragments—A, B, and C—provide a translation of approximately one-third of Le Roman.
Rhyme royal is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced to English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer.
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other.
Jorge Manrique was a major Castilian poet, whose main work, the Coplas a la muerte de su padre , is still read today. He was a supporter of the great queen, Isabel I of Castile, and actively participated on her side in the civil war that broke out against her half-brother, Enrique IV, when the latter attempted to make his daughter, Juana, crown princess. Jorge died in 1479 during an attempt to take the castle of Garcimuñoz, defended by the Marquis of Villena, after Isabel gained the crown.
An Essay on Criticism is one of the first major poems written by the English writer Alexander Pope (1688–1744). It is the source of the famous quotations "To err is human, to forgive divine", "A little learning is a dang'rous thing", and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread".
A virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music. It is one of the three formes fixes and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.
A rondeau is a form of medieval and Renaissance French poetry, as well as the corresponding musical chanson form. Together with the ballade and the virelai it was considered one of the three formes fixes, and one of the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries. It is structured around a fixed pattern of repetition of material involving a refrain. The rondeau is believed to have originated in dance songs involving alternating singing of the refrain elements by a group and of the other lines by a soloist. The term "Rondeau" is today used both in a wider sense, covering several older variants of the form – which are sometimes distinguished as the triolet and rondel – and in a narrower sense referring to a 15-line variant which developed from these forms in the 15th and 16th centuries. The rondeau is unrelated with the much later instrumental dance form that shares the same name in French baroque music, which is an instance of what is more commonly called the rondo form in classical music.
A décima is a ten-line stanza of poetry, and the song form generally consists of forty-four lines. It is also called "espinela" after its founder, Vicente Espinel (1550–1624), a Spanish writer and musician of the Siglo de Oro.
The villancico or vilancete (Portuguese) was a common poetic and musical form of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America popular from the late 15th to 18th centuries. With the decline in popularity of the villancicos in the 20th century, the term became reduced to mean merely "Christmas carol". Important composers of villancicos were Juan del Encina, Pedro de Escobar, Francisco Guerrero, Manuel de Zumaya, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gaspar Fernandes, and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 34 is included in what is referred to as the Fair Youth sequence, and it is the second of a briefer sequence concerned with a betrayal of the poet committed by the young man, who is addressed as a personification of the sun.
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 43 employs antithesis and paradox to highlight the speaker's yearning for his beloved and sadness in their absence, and confusion about the situation described in the previous three sonnets. Sonnet 27 similarly deals with night, sleep, and dreams.
Knittelvers is a kind of Germanic verse meter which originated in Germany during the Middle Ages. In Knittelvers, consecutive lines rhyme pairwise (AABB) and each line has four stresses. "Strict" Knittelvers has eight or nine syllables on each line, whereas "free" Knittelvers can use more or fewer. It may be considered a form of doggerel and is sometimes called "Knüttelvers" because of its rhythm. In German, this form of poetry was popular during the 15th and 16th centuries but rejected in the 17th before being brought back into use by Johann Christoph Gottsched in the 18th century.
The octosyllable or octosyllabic verse is a line of verse with eight syllables. It is equivalent to tetrameter verse in trochees in languages with a stress accent. Its first occurrence is in a 10th-century Old French saint's legend, the Vie de Saint Leger; another early use is in the early 12th-century Anglo-Norman Voyage de saint Brendan. It is often used in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetry. While commonly used in couplets, typical stanzas using octosyllables are: décima, some quatrains, redondilla.
Vietnamese poetry originated in the form of folk poetry and proverbs. Vietnamese poetic structures include six-eight, double-seven six-eight, and various styles shared with Classical Chinese poetry forms, such as are found in Tang poetry; examples include verse forms with "seven syllables each line for eight lines," "seven syllables each line for four lines", and "five syllables each line for eight lines." More recently there have been new poetry and free poetry.
The French alexandrine is a syllabic poetic meter of 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own.