17 September 2018

When two pentelopes elope

I decided to experiment further in this genre by writing a 'double' pentelope: presumably a Decalope?

Have a look at the results below.
This verse, as some of you will quickly gather,
Reflects a son, a husband and a father
Who three-wise all exist in one together;
This entity, predestined thus to bear
The links ‘twixt hither and we know not whither,
Apparently is heir and aye bequeather;
Now (though it seems an awful lot of bother),
Does Woman too not call for us to clothe her
In queenly robes of daughter, wife and mother,
Her euphony felicitously smoother?
Oaks Park PB 2018
Here are two pentelopes intimately intertwined, fortuitously in keeping with the masculine/feminine, male/female subtext!

From a technical viewpoint, instead of five 'rhymes' following the order of vowel-sounds, there are five pairs of rhymes. The couplets are semi-rhymes with short followed by long vowel sounds. I am reminded of the chromatic scale in music, where both tones and semitones are played.

Please forgive the sleight of hand between lines 4 and 5.

The Botanist

Wandering along Lake Baikal
Methought I saw flowering kale
And wolfsbane aplenty, enough to kill.
A thrush somewhere began to call,
The breeze around was rather cool.

Of course it wasn’t Pina del Mar
Acapulco, Cancun, Biarritz or Cambremer,
But the place somehow reminded of Grasmere
Less the daffs, with kale more,
Bleaker, with all the aspect of a moor.

Thanks once again to my French correspondent GH for this haunting pentelope. For those unfamiliar with the term 'pentelope', please search the site for a definition and lots of examples.