It’s been a long time since we had a Poster poems challenge based on a poetic form, so I thought this month we should look at something we’ve never tried before. Ottava rima is an eight-line stanza developed in Italy, usually associated in English with Byron and his fellow second-generation Romantics. The standard rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c and in English the lines are usually iambic pentameters.
The earliest known ottava rima poems were written by Boccaccio, including two long epic works, Teseida and Filostrato. These poems established ottava rima as the default stanza for epics on serious themes, a use that persisted in Italian until at least the 16th century, when Torquato Tasso used it for his embroidered tale of the Crusades, Gerusalemme liberata.
As with so many things Italian, ottava rima was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt, whose single-stanza Epigram LXI is nearer in tone to a sonnet than to his epic Italian models. It is a typically complex meditation on Wyatt’s favourite theme of the spurned lover, and the complex sentence structure, in which the resolution is constantly deferred through syntax, works in tandem with the rhyme pattern to produce a near-perfect lyric.
Elizabethan poets after Wyatt were quick to rediscover the epic potential of ottava rima. Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britannica was a 13,000-line rendition of the medieval legend of Troy. Michael Drayton turned to English history and the story of the early 14th-century revolt of the Barons against Edward II, known as the Despenser war, in The Barons’ War. Ottava rima was now established as the stanza form of choice for epic subject matter in English, to the extent that Edmund Spenser adapted it by inserting an extra “b” rhyme line to create the Spenserian stanza he used for The Faerie Queen.
This kind of epic poem fell out of fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the next significant ottava rima English poem to appear was John Hookham Frere’s Arthurian romance The Monks and the Giants, which was published in the early years of the 19th century under the pseudonym William Whistlecraft. Frere’s poem was a dull affair and would be long forgotten but for one happy fact: it was read and admired by Byron, who went on to use the stanza form for his great mock epic, Don Juan.
The success of Byron’s poem seems to have inspired his contemporaries. Shelley used it for his utopian fantasy The Witch of Atlas, which was a relatively modest 78 stanzas long. Keats used the form for Isabella, a Gothic tale of love doomed because it crossed class divisions, and a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites. These poems, which were neither epic nor humorous, expanded the emotional range of the ottava rima stanza.
This range was further expanded in the late works of WB Yeats, who used ottava rima for a number of poems, including three of his greatest, Sailing to Byzantium, Among School Children and The Circus Animals’ Desertion. In these poems the stanza is used to give stately, meditative structure to some of the most profound poetry of memory, mortality and art you will ever read. With Yeats, ottava rima came of age.
His influence can be seen in poems as diverse as Derek Mahon’s Courtyards in Delft, written in an irregularly rhyming variant, and Augustus Young’s serious mock epic, The Credit, which uses a syllabic version of eight syllables to the line with irregular feet. Unfortunately this is not available online, but a single stanza will give you a good idea:
Nothing has changed. No science can
protect the effects from the cause.
The birth, freed from the family plan,
reverts to genotypal laws.
The furies’ midwife genus, Man,
put back the morsel in the claws
of those whose chromosomes were rent,
contributing their fifty percent.
And so, this month’s challenge is to write a poem in ottava rima. You can be as strict or as flexible as you like – feel free to bend the rules to your needs. As for the tone and subject matter, you might want to go with Byron’s humour, Yeats’s high seriousness, or all points in between. Give us a single stanza epigram or fragments from an epic in progress. Let’s see which octave we wind up in.
