The rondel as a
poetic form is a variant of the
French rondeau.
It originated in Renaissance France, and is usually composed of thirteen lines around two rhymes. Each line has eight or ten syllables. The poem is divided into three stanzas - two quatrains and a cinquain. The first two lines of the first stanza serve as a refrain at the end of the second stanza(lines 7 and 8), and the first line is also the last line(line 13 - hence the 'roundness' from which the form gets its name). This form, as you may be able to tell by now, is much easier to look at than to explain. With that in mind, the rhyme scheme and format of the poem is usually:
A
B
b
a
a
b
A
B
a
b
b
a
A
...where capital letters indicate the repeating lines.
There are, of course, variations on the rondel variation, which include:
- The Free Rondel - in which the first line sets the number of syllables that will be in each line. Free rondels may also vary the rhyme scheme, making the first stanza ABab or the last stanza ababA.
- The French Sonnet, or Rondel Prime - in which the first two lines reappear at the end of the poem as a couplet, making it fourteen lines long. The definition Webster 1913 gives is actually for a French Sonnet.
When writing a rondel, it is best to keep in mind that the ending words of your first two lines will each need five rhymes in order to complete the poem. Some words that are
not good choices to end lines with
*:
Cusp,
Death,
Jinx,
Love,
Mollusk,
Month,
Mouth,
Normal,
Orange,
Sculpt,
Sixth, and
Wolf.
Edmund Gosse, Robert Louis Stevenson, W.E. Henley, and Neil Gaiman are all guilty of having indugled in this form of poetry. I have only written one so far, but they're pretty fun to do. (provided you're not one o'those "no form can be imposed upon my angst!" types.)
Sources include: The Norton Anthology, Mediadrone, and Bartleby.com. Oh, and I guess I should cite Mr. Gaiman, for getting me interested in the form with his rondel, Reading the Entrails.