Tercets

Links     References    Examples

 

Compiled by

Michael P. Garofalo

 

 

 

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Links and References

 

 

 


Breathing    By Peter Davidson


La charnière: Entre Quatrains et Tercets
  
10K


Cuttings:  Haiku and Short Poems
      Links, Guides, References, Index.    600K.   Author index, title index, guide
to teaching haiku poetry, classical Japanese haiku masters, concrete poetry directory, quotes about poetry, 
tercets, and selected haiku, tercets, and short poems by Michael P.  Garofalo.  


Dante:  The Divine Comedy   80K.  Victoria S. Poulakis.  "Translation: What Difference Does it Make?"


Dante's Inferno: Translations
    By Joan Taber Altieri.  53K.  "Dante uses hendecasyllabic meter based on the 
magic number three, which represents the Trinity, and multiples of three: in particular, three-squared, which 
represents Beatrice, and three times ten, the symbol of perfection, or God. There are thirty-three syllables per 
tercet and three metrical units per line, nine per tercet. The rhyme scheme (ABA BCB CDC, etc.) is Dante's 
own invention, and has the effect of bringing the action of the poem forward like a gently rolling wave folding 
over into itself, weaving it into a huge, complex net: transmogrify just one tercet, and the rhythm and flow 
are interrupted, unsettling the tercets that follow."


Dark Night of the Soul     By Ronald L. Ecker.   12K.  


Examples of Tercerts


From 100 Poems     Richard Bear


Glossary Articles from Sol Magazine


Beth Gylys.   Villanelles.


Haiku Index   120K+   Comprehensive title index to haiku websites and selected books.  


History of Haiku.    Ten haikuists and their works from Basho to Koi.  By Ryu Yotsuya. 


Hyper-Dictionary:  Tercet


Poetic Forms:  The Villanelle    By Conrad Geller.  16K.    Definition and three poems.  


Poetic References - Word of the Week:  Terza Rima     


Renga - Linked Forms, Links from DMOZ   Most English language Renga verse consists of
alternating tercets and couplets, by different authors, linked together by agreed upon rules.    


Short Verse Definitions and Guidelines
     By Dennis M. Garrison.   Templar Phoenix Literary Review Short
Verse Guidelines.   5K.  "Tercets are three-line poems, rhymed or unrhymed, of various meters.  An Enclosed Tercet
is three lines rhymed A-B-A.  A Sicilian Tercet is three lines of iambic pentameter rhymed A-B-A."


Specific Line Group Types    Brown University Women Writers Project.  12K.    "A tercet is a group of three lines that 
clearly stands as a compositional unit. Tercets can be stanzas: the villanelle, for example, is a fixed-form type of poem 
made up of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. They can also be sub-units of larger units such as strophes and 
verse paragraphs. Often, for example, tercets rhyming AAA will be interspersed throughout a poem that is 
primarily in couplets."


Stanzas and Stanzaic Form    Expansive Poetry & Music Online: Prosody.   31K.   Definitions and examples.


Tercet and Triad    By John Hewitt.   14K.     "The tercet (enclosed tercet) is a poetry form with Italian roots. One 
of the most famous examples of the tercet form is Dante's The Divine Comedy, which, in it's original form, was 
composed of three line stanzas, the first and third of which rhymed.  This is the classic form of a tercet: a 
three- lined poem stanza in which the first and last lines rhyme while the second line is blank (unrhymed)."


Tercets: Definition
     By Damon McLaughlin.   5K.  "If your writing a poem that is made up entirely of tercets, 
then they should behave in the same manner as a poem made up of couplets, evocative and somewhat 
self-contained. If not (perhaps you're writing a sonnet), then the tercet becomes a cog in a wheel, necessary
to the functioning of the poem."

 

Tercets - Examples 
(Poems featuring three line stanzas in an unrhymed free verse style.)

A. R. Ammons,   The City Limits    
A. R. Ammons,   From Sphere     
A. R. Ammons,   Motion's Holding       
Michael Anania,   The Edge of Autumn   
W. H. Auden,   Archaeology
W. H. Auden,   A Thanksgiving
Billy Collins,   An Introduction to Poetry    
Robert Creeley,   The Window
Peter Davidson,   Breathing Room    
James Dickey,   Buckdancer's Choice    
Morgan Gibson,   Searching for Dawn
June Jordan,   Nobody Riding the Roads Today
Alfred Kreymborg,   The Ditty the City Sang    
Philip Larkin,   Forget What Did
Denise Levertov,   Pleasures
Denise Levertov,   September 1961    
John Masefield,   A Consecration   
Robert Pinsky,   Essay on Psychiatrists
Robert Pinsky,   The Living     
Sylvia Plath,   Ariel
Sylvia Plath,   Fever 103º
Sylvia Plath,   Lady Lazarus
Mark Doty,   A Display of Mackerel    
Craig Raine,   In Modern Dress    
Anne Sexton,   Wanting to Die    
Louis Simpson,   American Poetry
William Stafford,   Christianite    
Wallace Stevens,   The Auroras of Autumn
Wallace Stevens,   Montrachet-Le-Jardin
Wallace Stevens,   Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
Wallace Stevens,   Repetitions of a Young Captain
Wallace Stevens,   The Snow Man  
Mark Strand,   Eating Poetry  
Lucien Stryk,   Bells of Lombardy
Lucien Stryk,   The Duckpond
Lucien Stryk,   A Sheaf for Chicago
Lucien Stryk,   Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu
James Tate,   The Lost PIlot
James Tate,   A Wedding
Louis Untermeyer,   Long Feud     
Derek Walcott,   Codicil
Roberta Hill Whiteman,   Star Quilt    
Richard Wilbur,   The Writer

 

Tercets - Examples
(Poems featuring three line stanzas in an rhymed free verse style.)

Jon Stallworthy,   Mother Tongue    
Wallace Stevens,   Oak Leaves Are Hands    
Wallace Stevens,   Sea Surface Full of Clouds
Donald Justice,   In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn

 

 

Tercets - Links from Google


Terza Rima
   5K


Terza Rima by Adrienne Rich    13 poems by Adrienne Rich.


Terza Rima
    By Alberto Ríos.  17K.  "Terza Rima is a poetic rhyme scheme which involve interlocking rhymes,
written in iambic tercets. The rhyme scheme is aba bcb cdc ded (and so forth) for as long as the poet wishes 
to continue. Although no specific line length is required, most terza rima poems in English are written in
iambic pentameter. If other line lengths are used, such as tetrameter, all lines must be in that length."

 

Terza Rima - Examples

W. H. Auden,  The Sea and the Mirror - Antonio
Boccaccio,   Amorosa Visione
Lord Byron,   Prophecy of Dante
Geoffrey Chaucer,   Complaint to His Lady
Dante,   Divine Comedy
T. S. Eliot,   Little Gidding, Part II
Robert Frost,   Acquainted with the Night
Archibald MacLeish,   Conquistador
Petrarch,   I Trionfi
Janan Platt,   Woman - A Terza Rima
Adrienne Rich,   Terza Rima
E. A. Robinson,    House on the Hill
Percy Bysshe Shelley,    Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelly,    The Triumph of Life
Richard Wilbur,    First Snow in Alsace
William Carlos Williams,   Yachts

 

Terza Rima - Links from DMOZ/Google


Triple–Rhyming in Dante's Inferno
     By Seth Zimmerman.   22K.  "What we label a triple–rhyme scheme, 
and usually visualize as an interlocking geometric pattern, is merely a static outline— an afterimage—of 
a dynamic thrust which carries the poet, his guides, and us, through the poem."


Villanelle     By Alberto Ríos.  26K.   "The villanelle carries a pattern of only two rhymes, and is marked most 
distinctively by its alternating refrain, which appears initially in the first and third lines of the opening tercet. In 
all, it comprises five tercets and a concluding quatrain.  Before the villanelle was made literary by the French 
in the late 1500s, it existed as a villanella, "an old Italian folk song with an accompanying dance."


The Villanelle - Forms     By Trevor Przyuski.   "The villanelle (French word meaning "rustic song") is a 
poetry form adopted by the French in the late 16th Century from earlier forms of Italian folk verse.  The form 
consists of five "tercets" (three line stanzas) and a quatrain in which the first and last line of the first stanza 
are repeated as closing lines in each stanza that follows.  The repetitious, circular movement of the form is 
said to represent the circles of French folk dances."


The Villanelle Form


Villanelle - Links from DMOZ/Google

 

Villanelles - Examples

W. H. Auden,   Villanelle
Sondra Ball,   Villanelle
Elizabeth Bishop,   One Art     
William Empson,   Slowly the Poison the Whole Bloodstream Fills
Barry Franklin,   Changing Clouds
Nicholas Gordon,   Villanelles for Free
Beth Gylys,   Villanelles   
Donald Justice,   Villanelle at Sundown   
Trevor Przyuski,   The Cat
E. A. Robinson,   Vilanelle of Change
Peter Schaeffer,   One Drunken Night
Dylan Thomas,   Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

 

 

 

 

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Selected Tercets

 

 

 

 

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow.
-  Percy Shelly, Ode to the West Wind

 

 

 

 

                        I caught a petal fallen from cherry tree in my hand.
                        Opening the fist
                        I find nothing there.
                                               -   Kyoshi Takahama

 

 

 

 

His question is complete because it contains
His utmost statement.  It is his own array,
His own pageant and procession and display.
-   Wallace Stevens, Questions are Remarks

 

 

 

 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
-   Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

 

 

 

 

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
-   Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 1923

 

 

 

 

That was their business.  As far as he was concerned
Suffering was life's penalty: wisdom armed one
Against madness; speech was temporary; poetry was truth.
-  Robert Pinsky, Essay on Psychiatrists

 

 

 

 

Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors dreams.
-  Basho

 

 

 

 

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
-   Theodore Roethke, The Waking

 

 

 

 

Long, look long and you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.
-   Sara Teasdale, Advice to a Girl

 

 

 

 

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

-   E. A. Robinson,  House on the Hill

 

 

 

 

Petals of chrysanthemum
Curve in their whiteness
Under the moon.
-   Hisajo Sugita

 

 

 

 

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-   Dylan Thomas, Do not go Gentle into that Good Night

 

 

 

 

Where the watch synchronizes every thing 
setting life to a metronomic rhythm,
Freedom is lost to the pendulum's swing. 
-   Betty Ann Whitney, Subliminal Message

 

 

 

 

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
to annihilate each decade.
-   Sylvia Plath,  Lady Lazarus

 

 

 

 

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
-   Mark Strand,  Eating Poetry

 

 

 

 

Moonlight slants through
The vast bamboo grove:
A cuckoo cries.
-   Basho

 

 

 

 

The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.
-   Richard Wilbur, First Snow in Alsace 

 

 

 

 

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la via diritta era smarrita.

 In the middle of our life's walk
I found myself in a dark wood
for the straight road was lost.
-  Dante, Divine Comedy

 

 

 

 

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart.
-   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

 

 

 

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark 
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
-   A. R. Ammons, The City Limits

 

 

 

 

We know of land that looks lonely,
but isn't, of beef with hides of velveteen,
of sorrow, an eddy in blood.
-   Roberta Hill Whiteman, Star Quilt

 

 

 

 

Turn back to where we were when we began:
An unhappy people in a happy world-
Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.
-   Wallace Stevens,  The Auroras of Autumn

 

 

 

 

Time oozed from my pores,
Drinking tea
I tasted the seven seas.

I saw in the mist formed
Around me
The fatal chrysanthemum, myself.
-   Shinkichi Takahashi,  Collapse

 

 

 

 

The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then
-   Author Unknown

 

 

 

 

      I feel dead.  I feel as if I were
          the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.
                     -   James Tate, The Lost PIlot

 

 

 

 

                            Deepening my grief,
snap
            of a branch.
                                 
-   Seishi

 

 

 

 

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
 Not with a bang but a whimper.
-   T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

 

 

 

 

Short summer night.
A dewdrop
On the back of a hairy caterpillar.
-   Buson

 

 

 

 

Cows are thinkers; in rain, they chew their cud,
Musing on this world, and seem to weep.
They wade slowly through the brackish crud.
-   Beth Gylys, Do Not Dive Head First

 

 

 

 

do you think that clouds can die?
what kind of heaven would they see?
I wonder how and I wonder why
-   Barry Franklin, Changing Clouds

 

 

 

 

Nobody meeting on the streets
But I rage from the crowded
overtones of emptiness.

-   June Jordan, Nobody Riding the Roads Today

 

 

 

 

The buddha on the moor;
from the end of his nose
hangs an icicle.
-  Issa

 

 

 

 

As all the pigs have turned back into men
And the sky is auspicious and the sea
Calm as a clock, we can all go home again.
-   W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror

 

 

 

 

      a life confirmed
 I knit my joy
                               with pastel yarn
                                                                      -   Francine Porad, On a Wire

 

 

 

As little flowers, which all the frosty night
Hung pinched and drooping, lift their stalks and fan
Their blossoms out, touched by the warm white light,
-  Dante, Divine Comedy, Canto II, Line 127, 

 

 

 

 

"Now I know everything! "so cries
The foolish youth.  But when he sighs
Ali, I know nothing," he is wise.
-   Latin epigram

 

 

 

 

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an Enchanter fleeing
-  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

 

 

 

 

While I work layers of white on white 
Canvases on which are drawn 
From some past stretch of morning light. 
-   Betty Whitney, Morning Light

 

 

 

 

A crease, a curve, soft to sight, it lies 
somewhere between a rhythm and a rhyme-- 
beauty clouds by accident, and surprise.
-   Fra Filippo Lippi's Eyes

 

 

 

 

The realization heavy on this balding little head,
he sat is silence staring at the wall.
Nothing more could then be said.
-   Trevor Pryuski, The Cat

 

 

 

 

Such a warm light, as in Greece descended
but with flying snow, not sand, along
this April ice on window frame appended.
-   Vincent Katz, Understanding Objects

 

 

 

 

  Frozen puddles -
   the crack of axes
         from four directions.
                                      
-   Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings

 

 

 

 

 

On the road to Mandalay
Where the flyin' fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay.'
-  Rudyard Kipling, Mandalay

 

 

 

 

                   This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
                leave us alone on the road.
                                           Denise Levertov, September 1991

 

 

 

 

                This world of dew 
                          is only a world of dew - 
 and yet ...
                                      
-   Issa

 

 

 

 

It's a kind of self-delusion, terza rima,
As if all I need is one more rhyming word,
And I'll possess this changeless panorama
-   Jacqueline Osherow, One Last Terza Rima/Italian Train

 

 

 

 

Men marry what they need. I marry you,
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.
-   John Ciardi

 

 

 

 

Time can say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you, I would let you know.
-   W. H. Auden, Villanelle

 

 

 

 

At the club with pool and courts, 
sweating on the gray carpet, 
the copper woman in bike shorts, 

busy like a sprocket, fit, 
well not quite.  When her head 
weakens,  her thighs remit.
-   Janan Platt, Woman - A Terza Rima

 

 

 

 

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light
-   Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night

 

 

 

 

A lovely thing to see:
through the paper window's hole,
the Galaxy.
-   Issa

 

 

 

 

Musical and sweet, the villanelle,
like light reflected in a gentle rhyme,
moves to the ringing of a silver bell,

its form creating soft and tender spells.
Like the singing of distant silver chimes,
musical and sweet, the villanelle
Sondra Ball

 

 

 

 

         Life is a downward plunge and death is deep;
                Where essence springs, earth opens to consume,
In night is born a flame that cannot keep.
-   Ronald L. Ecker, Villanelle

 

 

 

 

                Cricket chirp-
now
                   my life is clear.
                                 
-   Hakuu

 

 

 

 

At heart there's nothing, not the dread
of death.  I know too many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character.
-   Derek Walcott, Codicil

 

 

 

 

To which the carved stone tablets would give rise—
Let’s say God got in over his head,
Which really shouldn’t be much of a surprise
-   Jacqueline Osherow, Terza Rima for a Sudden Change in Seasons

 

 

 

 

                                                    Old pond
                                              frog jumps in
                                              Splash!
                                                                      -  Basho

 

 

 

 

       A frog floats
 belly up
-
        dead silence.

                                                           -  Michael P. Garofalo, Above the Fog

 

 

 

 

I know you cannot come, and still I strain
To put my arms around you through the veil.
I feel as though my heart must stop with pain.
-   Nicholas Gordon, Villanelles

 

 

 

 

She says: I gave my name and it was taken
I no longer have my name
I gave my word and it was broken

My words are learning
to walk on crutches
through traffic
-   Adrienne Rich, Terza Rima

 

 

 

 

No doubt the Devil grins as a sea of ink I splatter, 
Ye gods forgive my literary sins, 
For the rest do not matter.
-   Robert Huron

 

 

 

 

 

        Closer, closer
        to paradise

 how cold.
- Issa

 

 


 

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
-   Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

 

 

 

 

A pair of blackbirds
warring in the roses,
one or two poppies

losing their heads,
the trampled lawn
a battlefield of dolls.
-   Craig Raine,  In Modern Dress

 

 

 

 

In this world
we walk on the roof of hell
      gazing at flowers.
-   Issa

 

 

 

 

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
-   Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

 

 

 

 

       By moonlight, I found
 a beaver serenely
    floating, and spoke.
                               -   Richard Bear, 100 Poems

 

 

 

 

There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies,
— And others corrupted, rich and triumphant

That have the expanse of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.
-   Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences

 

 

 

 

This is the ascent into the self,
                encountering possibility just as it
        flowers into the actual.
                                         -   Peter Davidson,  No Escape

 

 

 

 

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God.  I am a lantern -

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expressive.
-   Sylvia Plath,  Fever 103°

 

 

 

 

Throw away your wishbone, 
straighten up your backbone, 
stick out your jawbone and go to it.
-   B. J. Palmer,  As a Man Thinketh

 

 

 

 

Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
-   Louis Simpson,  American Poetry

 

 

 

 

The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm
And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green
And in its watery radiance, while the hue

Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled
Round those flotillas.  And sometimes the sea
Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.
-   Wallace Stevens,  Sea Surface Full of Clouds

 

 

 

 

The False another portion sought,
The True with tediousness were fraught,
The Best could not be bought.
-   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

 

 

 

A solitary 
                          crow on a bare branch —

            autumn evening.
                           
-   Basho

 

 

 

                         This cat in my lap
                         purring, eyes closed, ears back-- 
                         fur on my fingers.
                                           -   Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings: Summer

 

 

 

 

                      Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
 more fun than knowing.
                       -   W. H. Auden,  Archaeology

 

 

 

 

Exalted and confused.  Even in affliction - grotesque
Illnesses, poverty, ruined hopes, the world's
Rage and the body's - the most miserable.

Find in the mere daylight and air
A miraculous daily bread.  Fairy bread:
We eat and are changed.  Survivors.
-   Robert Pinsky, The Living

 

 

 

 

It was his story.  It would always be his story.
It followed him; it overtook him finally -
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
-   Donald Justice,  In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn

 

 

 

 

Distance between the rocks,
Half the day
In shadow, is the distance

Between man who thinks
And the man
Who thinks he thinks: wait.
-   Lucien Stryk,  Zen:  The Rocks of Sesshu

 

 

 

 

              Don't kill the fly-
it wrings
                its hands, its feet.
                 -   Issa

 

 

 

 

                              That scrawny cry It was
                              A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
                              It was part of the colossal sun,

                              Surrounded by its choral rings,
                              Still far away. It was like
                              A new knowledge of reality.
                                              
                                                          -  Wallace Stevens
                                                              Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Haiku and Short Poems
Links, References, Guides

 

 

 

 

Cuttings

Short Poems by Michael P. Garofalo
Quatrains, Couplets, Haiku, Free Verse, Fragments

 

 

Quotes for Gardeners

Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clichés, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,500 Quotes Arranged by Over 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

 

 

 

 

The Spirit of Gardening

 

 

 

 

 




 

I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California

 


A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo


Michael P. Garofalo's Poetry Notebook II


Tercets
64K, 20 March 2002, Version 1.
Distributed on the Internet since March 15, 2002.

 

 

The Spirit of Gardening

Quotes for Gardeners

Haiku and Zen Poetry

Cuttings:  Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo

 

 

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