Prompt: Quatrain Definitions

In this short month and following last month's zuhitsu prompt that generated many long poems, we will ask you to write a poem in a short form. 

The quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Persia, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China, and continues into the 21st century. 

In the eleventh century, the poet Omár Khayyám created a book of connected quatrain verses known as the “Rubáiyát” which translates as quatrains in Arabic. In the nineteenth century, the “Rubáiyát” was translated by an English poet named Edward Fitzgerald, which brought about a resurgence of this four-line stanza. Nostradamus used quatrains to write his prophecies. Rumi used the form for many poems.

A quatrain can be a four-line stanza using a rhyme scheme, but these six quatrains by Ursula K. Le Guin illustrate how one alone can also be a short poem. 

SOLSTICE 

On the longest night of all the year

in the forests up the hill,

the little owl spoke soft and clear

to bid the night be longer still.

To make this prompt a bit more challenging, we ask you to use as your title a single word - an unusual word, a word that will need a definition for many readers - and your quatrain will be a rhyming definition.

For example, if your title is "CORUSCATE," the four rhyming lines will need to make it clear - without sounding like a dictionary - that this word means to glitter, sparkle, in bright flashes - like gems or the sunlight on moving water.

I could not find a poem that exactly fits the three requirements of this prompt, so I simply used on the website prompt examples of stanzas from the poems below to illustrate the rhyme possibilities.

You will also need to choose a rhyme scheme. Here are six of the fifteen possibilities and examples of poems containing stanzas using them.

• ABAC or ABCB  is known as unbounded or ballad quatrain - see Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” , “Sadie and Maud” by Gwendolyn Brooks or Melville's "In the Prison Pen."
• AABB is a double couplet) - see A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” 
• ABAB is known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic) see Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. This is also known as an elegiac stanza and is in iambic pentameter.
• ABBA is known as envelope or enclosed - Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” fit this type
• AABA, is the stanza rhyme scheme in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” 

Your task: a poem that defines the one-word title in four rhyming lines.

Submission Deadline: February 28, 2022

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