Fun with Forms 3: Gregorian Sonnet

As I may have mentioned earlier: I came kicking and screaming to meter and form. And free verse still runs in my veins. Several years ago, I began playing with a sonnet form of my own device that ran up the flag of free verse for one moment in that country of meter.

First, the rhyme scheme hid the rhyme scheme. It was based on a repeating design of 5 lines in an A-B-C-B-A scheme. The second set of five began with that unrymed third line: C-D-E-D-C. Some of the rhymes were so far apart, one could lose fact of the rhyme. For example, the A rhyme is spaced by 3 lines. The C is spaced by 2 and 3 lines respectively. The pattern tends to the irregular. But isn’t.

Yet here’s where the freak flag flew freely. Because this was a poem of 14 lines, there would not be another set of 5. Instead the final set, a quatrain only, begins with the unrhymed line of the previous scheme and continues similarly as before: E-F-G-F but ends abruptly, leaving that poor 13th line ultimately unrhymed.

And because the unrhymed 13th line was the "G" line, snd since I was myself born on the 13th, I decided to dub this one in my own name: the Gregorian Sonnet.

In pentameter, by the way. And the turn should come at the quatrain.

I should note that the last time I wrote a poem in this form, I ended up rhyming the last three lines. The flag had finally and completely fallen. Like Kurt Vonnegut would say; "no damned G line, no damned Gregorian". Guess I'll call that one a Julian. Or maybe more appropriately, Fools.