Dating back to Boccaccio, this form has been adopted by everyone from Spenser to Yeats. Now it’s your turn
It’s been a long time since we had a Poster poems challenge based on a poetic form, so I thought this month we should look at something we’ve never tried before. Ottava rima is an eight-line stanza developed in Italy, usually associated in English with Byron and his fellow second-generation Romantics. The standard rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c and in English the lines are usually iambic pentameters.
The earliest known ottava rima poems were written by Boccaccio, including two long epic works, Teseida and Filostrato. These poems established ottava rima as the default stanza for epics on serious themes, a use that persisted in Italian until at least the 16th century, when Torquato Tasso used it for his embroidered tale of the Crusades, Gerusalemme liberata.
Nothing has changed. No science can
protect the effects from the cause.
The birth, freed from the family plan,
reverts to genotypal laws.
The furies’ midwife genus, Man,
put back the morsel in the claws
of those whose chromosomes were rent,
contributing their fifty percent.
