Incremental Poetry ~ 13 Lines

Transitory

As clouds cannot one moment hold their form,
So life moves on through weariness and mirth,
And death is more significant than birth.

The pain from which we shudder is the norm,
And satisfaction can’t be dulled by dearth;
As clouds cannot one moment hold their form,
So life moves on through weariness and mirth.

Though calm preferred, true strength is made in storm.
Effecting change is what gives man his worth;
He has but only days to roam the earth.
As clouds cannot one moment hold their form,
So life moves on through weariness and mirth,
And death is more significant than birth.

Copyright © 2018 Abigail Gronway – All Rights Reserved

Welcome to my series, Incremental Poetry, where each week the featured poem will be one line longer than the one I share the week before. I have no idea how long I’ll keep this up, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Thank you for stopping by.

About the Poem:
Sometimes I float in the pool and look up at the clouds in the sky, watching them swirl and change their shape, some quickly, some slowly, but all surely. And in the clouds I am reminded that time never slows, and life is always changing—people are always changing. And what we do with our days under the sun is what matters most.

Scansion:
Chaucerian Roundel
Chaucer developed this form from the rondel rather than the roundel, though admittedly there is little difference between the two.
13-line poem in iambic pentameter
comprised of a tercet, quatrain, and sestet
It is stanzaic, as Chaucer himself wrote a series of three roundels.
It has three refrain lines. The first two lines of the opening tercet are repeated at the end of the quatrain, and the entire tercet is repeated at the end of the sestet.
Rhyme scheme: AB¹B² abAB¹ abbAB¹B²

Note: I have also seen sources that show the following definition of a Chaucerian Roundel:
a decastich (10-line poem), with any line length or rhythm
Rhyme scheme: Abb abA abbA
Basically, the refrain is limited to only one line in this version.
I prefer the longer version simply because the source where I learned of it includes an actual example from Chaucer’s work that follows the 13-line pattern.