Poetry of
Iolanda Scripca in the May / June 2010 Sketchbook
Terza
Rima*
Farewell to the Unknown
As I lie still
and wait my soul to rest
Unwelcome darkness pulling down my eyelids
In double spaces, horizontal in my chest
A beating heart is melting sorrow's acids
Surrounded by cocoons with handsome faces
As shadows on the walls paint tentacles of squids.
You tear the curtains quietly from spaces
I feel I've lost you when we have never met
The dance, the passion, lips and those caresses—
That Hurricane, that Heat, that Rain I won't forget...
A silent movie and some shutters locked
Unwanted shelter - I'll always regret...
*
As I must die a
while and go to unknown places
Farewell Immortal Love, I bow to you with graces...
*Terza Rima
is an accentual-syllabic Italian stanza form containing
any number of interlocking, enclosed triplet stanzas.
The first and third lines of each stanza rhyme; the second
line of any given stanza rhymes with the first and third
lines of the following stanza. In other words, the
ending of the second line of any stanza becomes the rhyme
for the following stanza: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc. The
poem usually ends with a single line that rhymes with the
second line of the last triplet. The thirteenth-century
Italian poet Dante introduced the stanza form in
Divina Commedia. Many writers have employed
the form in English: Chaucer,, Wyatt, Sidney, Daniel,
and Milton. The English Romantic poets experimented
with variations of the form: Byron, Shelly. Instead,
of a single ending line, Shelly employed a couplet rhymed
from the second line of the last triplet ("Ode to the West
Wind"). Variations of line-length and loose rhymes
were employed by later English and American writers:
Browning, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Roy Fuller, and
Arcibald MacLeish. Other 19th and 20th century
European poets using the form include Dutch poets Potgieter
and van Eeden and the Germans A. W. Schlegel, Chamisso,
Liliencron, Heyse, George, and Hofmannsthal.
Padgett, Ron,
ed. The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms.
New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative,
1987, p. 203-204.
Preminger, Alex
and T.V.F. Brogan, editors.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetry and Poetics: The Most Comprehensive Guide to World
Poetry. MJF
Books, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 1271.
Turco, Lewis.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third
Edition. Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 2000, p. 275.
Ekphrastic Poem: A Love I Can’t Forget
Ekphrastic Poem:
Couplet Haiga: Rootless Freedom
Quatrain: Attempting Freedom
