Cinquain

In poetry, a cinquain or quintain is a five line stanza, varied in rhyme and line, usually with the rhyme scheme ababb. An example of cinquain is the following stanza from Robert Browning's poem "Porphyria's Lover":

Related Topics:
Poetry - Stanza - Rhyme - Rhyme scheme - Robert Browning

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Murmuring how she loved me -- she

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Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,

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To set its struggling passion free

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From pride, and vainer ties dissever,

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And give herself to me for ever.

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Cinquain also has a more specialized meaning. Under the influence of Japanese poetry, the American poet Adelaide Crapsey developed a poetic form she also called a "cinquain". Hers is a short, unrhymed poem of twenty-two syllables, five lines of 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables respectively.

Related Topics:
Japanese poetry - Adelaide Crapsey

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Her cinquains were published posthumously in 1915 in her The Complete Poems. Cinquains became better known through the work of Carl Sandburg (Cornhuskers, 1918) and Louis Utermeyer (Modern American Poetry, 1919). Here is the Crapsey cinquain "Triad":

Related Topics:
1915 - Carl Sandburg - Louis Utermeyer

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These be

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Three silent things:

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The falling snow... the hour

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Before the dawn... the mouth of one

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Just dead.

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