Prompt: Round

I was looking through some books on poetic forms for a new form to use here. I noticed four forms that not only begin with "R" but also have similarities.

The Rondeau is a lyric poem from the 13th century which is characterized by repeating lines or "rounds". It has 15 lines written as a quintet, quatrain, and sestet, with two rhyme schemes.

The Rondel is a 14th-century French lyrical poem that is a variation of the Roundeau. It consists of two quatrains followed by a quintet (13 lines total) or a sestet (14 lines total). The first two lines are refrains which repeat at the end of the second and third stanzas. The rhyming pattern is ABba, abAB, abbaA.

Then we have the Rondolet, another French form consisting of a single septet with two rhymes and one refrain. The refrain is written in tetra-syllabic or dimeter, and the other lines are twice as long - octasyllabic or tetrameter.

And finally, the Roundel, a form created by Algernon Charles Swinburne as a variation of the rondeau form.

DON'T PANIC. We are not asking for any of those four. They are all examples of forms that get so specific that they can trap the poet.

What I see as the central structural element shared across all four forms is the recurring refrain derived from the poem's opening phrase and an organization of three distinct movements or stanzas. So, here is our new poetic form designed around those shared mechanics without any constraints on rhyme or syllable counts. Let's just call it simply a "round."

While "round" is rarely used as a modern standalone name for a text-only poem, it is the literal English translation and ancestor of all these French forms. You probably know rounds as songs like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Frère Jacques," "Three Blind Mice," and"Sumer Is Icumen In" which is the oldest known English round, dating back to around 1250 AD.

As you can see in our example poem, the title is also the refrain repeated in the first line and in the last line, making a kind of circle, a round.

In summary, the poem is 12 lines in 3 stanzas. It's free verse (no forced syllable counts or rhyme schemes required). The form also suggests that the poem in some way is itself thematically circular.

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Jisei: Japanese Death Poems and Haiku

Like a lotus leaf’s evaporating dew

I, too 

vanish.

— Senryu

Here are some English translations of jisei, or Japanese death poems. Not all the poems are haiku. Some are tanka or waka. Sme are Buddhist in nature, but some are poets seeking enlightenment. A few may have found it, while others seem more doubtful of the possibility.

Oh, fallen camellias,

if I were you,

I'd leap into the torrent!

― Takaha Shugyo

Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." 

Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life., though some of the poems are written in the contemplation of death. A good number of these poems are widely considered to be the final statements on life and death by poets facing their final days here on earth. 

The first soft snow:

leaves of the awed jonquil

bow low

― Matsuo Basho

Grasses wilt:

the braking locomotive

grinds to a halt.

― Yamaguchi Seishi

Farewell! I pass

as all things do:

dew drying on grass.

— Banzan

Many, but not all, of these poems are haiku. The influence of haiku on modern English poetry is clear. Certain precepts of Imagism relate more or less directly to haiku, such as the use of concrete imagery and "direct treatment of the thing (object/subject)." Ezra Pound translated Oriental poetry and wrote similar original poems himself, such as "In a Station of the Metro."

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

You can also see this influence in poems such as "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. Other English-language poets who either wrote, translated, or were influenced by haiku include Richard Wright, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Amy Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, Margaret Atwood, and Robert Hass. Oriental influences have also been noted in the writings of early modernists like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

— Langston Hughes, "Suicide’s Note"

The spring lingers on

In the scent of a damp log

Rotting in the sun.

— Richard Wright

Elderly sunflowers:

bees trimming their beards.

— Michael R. Burch

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A Political Ars Poetica

My last post was about Auden's thought that "poetry makes nothing happen," which questions seeing poetry as political or able to change the world. But this month I also noted that Juliana Spahr won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her recent collection, Ars Poeticas, a politically charged meditation on poetry’s role in what she describes as “dark times.”

“Ars poeticas" literally means “art of poetry.” Her collection takes that title from the Roman poet Horace’s foundational treatise on the art of poetry, which has inspired a tradition across cultures and languages of poets writing their own “ars poeticas” - meta-poems that are meditations on the art of poetry itself. 

Her book addresses ecological crises, the rise of authoritarian populism and the possibilities of collective care and resistance. Spahr, who is a professor of contemporary American literature at Northeastern University, follows developments across the nuclear age from the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb test in 1954 to today’s moment of crisis, species extinction, and political upheaval. In an interview, she described her book as moving into questions about poetry’s “social” role, broader utility, and even complicity in larger systems.

In “Will There be Singing,” she writes:

I thought for a while there were two sorts of poets.
Poets who write the terrible nation into existence
and poets screwing around doing something else.

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Making Nothing Happen

W. H. Auden famously asserted that "poetry makes nothing happen” in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”   

By writing that, Auden rejected the idea that poetry serves as a direct tool for political or practical change. Its value does not lie in changing the physical world, but in surviving as a voice for the human experience.

That sounds cynical, but it reflects his view of what art can—and cannot—do. He wrote it on the brink of World War II. He was confronting the limitations of literature in an era of rising Fascism and geopolitical chaos. Some reading this post may feel the same way about poetry in our current state of the world.

Why Yeats? Despite Yeats's lifelong political involvement and nationalist verse, Auden reflects that  "Ireland has her madness and her weather still." The poems did not change things. A poem cannot alter historical events, stop a war, pass laws, or feed the hungry. 

But Auden wasn't declaring poetry useless. Take that stanza further:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

Literary critics also point to a subtle grammatical paradox: poetry makes nothing happen. That is, art takes the invisible, intangible aspects of human existence—grief, silence, absence, or "nothing"—and transforms them into something tangible through language. And it survives.

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