BITTERSWEET (A PARADELLE FOR AUTUMN)
Gone is the bird song that once filled the sky
Gone is the bird song that once filled the sky
Now the wind moans low like lovers in need
Now the wind moans low like lovers in need
In need like a lover, that once filled the sky
Gone is the bird now like a low moan of wind
We have gleaned from the earth its bountiful fruit
We have gleaned from the earth its bountiful fruit
The fields are empty, the harvest is in
The fields are empty, the harvest is in
In the harvest gleaned of its bountiful fruit
From the earth we have empty fields
The leaves are beautiful in their dying
The leaves are beautiful in their dying
This is the swan song of earth
This is the swan song of earth
In their swan song dying
the leaves of earth are beautiful
The sky we have gleaned, empty as bird song
fields the leaves beautifully, in the harvest
dying, bountiful fruit gone, once
of earth in need like a lover’s swan song
filled by the low moans of wind
Ever tune anything in a dark hallway?
Ever tune anything in a dark hallway?
Let’s dance on rose petals and glass;
Let’s dance on rose petals and glass;
Anything, let’s dance in a dark hallway,
and ever tune glass on rose petals?
A slow song that always speeds up;
A slow song that always speeds up;
Overactive pulse hops in your throat;
Overactive pulse hops in your throat;
Always a pulse speeds up overactive,
in your throat that slow song hops;
Candles beside a moonlit hot tub;
Candles beside a moonlit hot tub;
I could relive this moment forever;
I could relive this moment forever;
Forever I could relive moonlit candles,
this moment beside a hot tub;
A slow song on? I relive this moment;
Overactive pulse always speeds up;
In a dark hallway glass hops in your throat;
Candles, let’s dance beside rose petals;
A moonlit tub could tune anything
that hot forever and ever .
~This Form~
(Paradelle)
What can I say to you more?
What can I say to you more?
This form for me is so much fun
This form for me is so much fun
To you what more can I say
So much fun for me this form is…
Afraid I am already addicted to this
Afraid I am already addicted to this
Playing with words from the heart they come
Playing with words from the heart they come
Already to this afraid I am addicted
From the heart playing-they come from the heart
Hooked on verses of every kind
Hooked on verses of every kind
Toying with words, moving the lines
Toying with words, moving the lines
Of every kind hooked on verses
Moving the lines-toying with words
To you this form say more
With words and verses of every kind
Already addicted moving the lines
From the heart hooked on to this
Afraid they already come playing
With so much fun.
Dorian Petersen Potter
aka ladydp2000
copyright@2004
October.26.2016
~Authors notes:
"The Paradelle" is a modern poetry form or style invented by Billy Collins as a parody of the Villanelle poetry style.
(Paradelle)
What can I say to you more?
What can I say to you more?
This form for me is so much fun
This form for me is so much fun
To you what more can I say
So much fun for me this form is…
Afraid I am already addicted to this
Afraid I am already addicted to this
Playing with words from the heart they come
Playing with words from the heart they come
Already to this afraid I am addicted
From the heart playing-they come from the heart!
Hooked on verses of every kind
Hooked on verses of every kind
Toying with words, moving the lines
Toying with words, moving the lines
Of every kind hooked on verses
Moving the lines-toying with words
To you this form say more
With words and verses of every kind
Already addicted moving the lines
From the heart hooked on to this
Afraid they already come playing
With so much fun!
Dorian Petersen Potter
aka ladydp2000
copyright@2004
09.17.2014
* Specifically, this piece is a Paradelle, but this option is not available*
We walked the same old streets.
We walked the same old streets.
And dined the same cheeper diners.
And dined the same cheeper diners.
Dined, we walked cheeper, the same
old streets, same diners.
Our paths crossed on weekdays.
Our paths crossed on weekdays.
I am unaware of your smell and touch.
I am unaware of your smell and touch.
Unaware, our paths smell and touch on weekdays,
I am crossed of your.
Our love tried to slip away.
Our love tried to slip away.
But fate had another plan.
But fate had another plan.
To slip away, love fate.
Had tried another, but our plan.
We unaware of weekdays love,
your touch tried to walk
the same old paths, cheeper,
but another plan and dined,
had our fate crossed.
diners slip away, I am diner's smell.
As the wind tosses winsome heather
As the wind tosses winsome heather
In the currents of an airy sea
In the currents of an airy sea
In the currents of winsome heather
The wind tosses as an airy sea
The senses filled with scent of sweet breeze
The senses filled with scent of sweet breeze
On the wind is sweet flower perfume to tease
On the wind is sweet flower perfume to tease
Sweet scent; on wind is perfume to tease
Senses filled with the flower breeze
Inhale the gust; seize it as a beautiful memory
Inhale the gust; seize it as a beautiful memory
Capture this winsome heather memory forever
Capture this winsome heather memory forever
Inhale the gust; capture a winsome memory
Capture the wind in memory ,
One gust is a perfume tease
This sweet scent of flower inhale, seize
as it tosses winsome heather
on the beautiful breeze;
Senses filled with the currents of an airy sea forever.
Your love song lapsed into ancient French that April day.
I only understood the words of spring and heartsore
lapsed. Only love and heartsore, I understood your ancient
words of the spring-day song into that French April.
You fabricate my pauses into repetition, silence speaks
of ages strung to rhyme in love’s difficult service
you strung into pauses in service to ages. Fabricate of
love’s repetition, rhyme speaks my difficult silence.
We practice tedium of vows till language breaks apart.
As if art should aim at science, rigorous, quantitative,
rigorous language breaks tedium. Science vows a part of
quantitative practice till we should aim “as if” at art.
Till we lapsed into language. As your ancient ages only
fabricate quantitative French strung to that difficult
practice, science speaks of tedium and understood rhyme.
The spring in service of love’s rigorous vows. April
pauses, heartsore. You and I, apart. If love should aim
my words at day, repetition breaks into silence of song.
Introduction
The peculiar pleasure of reading a Paradelle comes from hearing language return and then watching it refuse to remain fixed. A phrase first appears as statement, image, or confession; repetition gives it weight; recombination then exposes meanings that were latent inside it. The reader therefore experiences each poem twice at once: as an unfolding subject and as a record of the poet negotiating with a limited store of words. That tension can produce solemnity, wit, surprise, unease, or lyrical intensity.
Placed side by side, community poems reveal how many artistic temperaments can inhabit the same demanding framework. One poet may favor clear syntax and narrative continuity, while another may welcome fractured grammar, double meanings, or dreamlike association. Repetition can sound devotional in one poem, obsessive in another, and comic in a third. Even poems that begin with similar subjects may diverge sharply because each writer chooses a different vocabulary, tonal register, and route toward closure.
Browse the poems in this collection with attention to those choices rather than treating each work as a test of formal compliance. A single example can demonstrate one successful solution, but several examples reveal the form's larger field of possibility. Compare how different poets plant versatile words, manage inevitable echoes, preserve a recognizable voice, and make the concluding language feel discovered rather than merely assembled. Reading beyond the first example also helps distinguish purposeful strangeness from accidental awkwardness-and shows why constraint can become a source of invention rather than a barrier to it.
Reading Guide
A Paradelle invites two complementary kinds of attention. First, read for the human experience being presented: the scene, voice, conflict, or emotional movement. Then read again for the changing work performed by recurring language. Because familiar words return in altered relationships, meaning often develops through placement rather than through a steady supply of new information. As you read the community poems, notice not only whether the language fits together, but whether its returns deepen the poem. The most revealing comparisons concern how poets turn recurrence into pressure, variation, and consequence.
- The emotional change inside repetition: An unchanged line can feel different after the reader has encountered another image or statement. It may shift from observation to warning, longing, irony, or self-persuasion. When comparing poems, ask: what has the second hearing gained that the first hearing did not possess?
- The usefulness of the opening vocabulary: Early word choices determine what the poem can later say, so nouns, verbs, pronouns, and connective words all carry unusual weight. Notice which words remain expressive in several arrangements. Ask: did the poet choose language with enough range to support both clarity and discovery?
- Syntax under pressure: Rearranged language may remain smooth, become deliberately fractured, or alternate between the two. Awkwardness can communicate shock, disorientation, or urgency, but it can also distract. Ask: does unusual syntax serve the poem's state of mind, or does it merely reveal the struggle with constraint?
- Sound carried across rearrangements: Repeated consonants, vowels, and rhythmic clusters survive even when syntax changes. These echoes can bind a stanza together or make recurrence feel incantatory. Ask: which sounds become more noticeable as the same words enter new combinations?
- Movement between stanzas: Each section needs a distinct contribution even though the poem is built toward later reuse. Look for changes in scene, time, speaker, scale, or emotional temperature. Ask: does each stanza expand the situation, complicate it, or merely repeat an established mood?
- The nature of closure: The ending may gather earlier images into a clear resolution, expose a contradiction, or leave productive ambiguity. Its vocabulary is familiar, but its statement should not feel inevitable too soon. Ask: does the conclusion transform what came before, or simply inventory it?
After reading once for sense and once for construction, compare several poets' approaches aloud. The ear often detects emotional shifts, forced phrasing, and resonant sound patterns that silent reading misses. A strong Paradelle rewards both immersion and close inspection.
Writing Tips
Approach a Paradelle as a workshop in linguistic consequence: every memorable word must do useful work now and remain capable of doing different work later. Begin with an emotional or imaginative problem that repetition can intensify-a memory that will not release the speaker, an argument heard more than once, a ritual, a transformation, or a scene whose meaning changes under scrutiny. The goal is not merely to complete the pattern. It is to make the reader feel that this subject needed echoes, rearrangements, and a restricted vocabulary in order to become fully visible.
- Choose material with internal recurrence. Subjects involving obsession, grief, prayer, habit, surveillance, seasonal return, or competing versions of an event naturally benefit from language that comes back altered. If the subject depends primarily on rapid plot development or extensive explanation, the available verbal space may feel cramped rather than generative.
- Build a flexible word bank before polishing lines. List concrete nouns, active verbs, pronouns, modifiers, and connecting words associated with the subject. Test whether they can form more than one meaningful relationship. A beautiful phrase filled with inflexible vocabulary may create trouble later; a modest word with several grammatical or emotional uses may prove more valuable.
- Let the source lines sound alive on first arrival. Do not treat them as storage bins assembled only to supply later vocabulary. They must establish voice, image, and tension before the reader knows how they will be reused. Avoid stuffing them with conspicuous extra words whose sole purpose is solving a future construction problem.
- Use repetition as dramatic action. Decide why the speaker says a line again. The second utterance might insist, mourn, mock, plead, verify, or fail to believe itself. Reading both instances aloud with different implied emphasis can reveal whether the repetition has emotional purpose.
- Plan contrasts among the major sections. Give each one a task: establish a scene, complicate a relationship, shift perspective, or reveal a cost. Contrast prevents the poem from becoming a series of equivalent verbal exercises and provides the ending with several strands worth gathering.
- Permit strangeness, but control it. Recombination can generate startling syntax and unexpected image pairings. Keep those moments when they sharpen atmosphere or thought. Revise passages that become private puzzles, unintentional comedy, or strings of words the reader cannot emotionally enter.
- Compose toward an ending rather than merely arriving there. Sketch several possible concluding statements while drafting earlier sections. This backward pressure helps you plant words capable of producing recognition, reversal, or ambiguity. The ending should sound newly meaningful even though its verbal materials are already known.
- Guard the individual voice. Constraint can flatten diction into neutral, puzzle-solving language. Preserve the speaker's characteristic attitude through word choice, sentence energy, sound, and image. A bitter speaker, a playful speaker, and a contemplative speaker should not become indistinguishable merely because they face the same formal problem.
During revision, separate the technical audit from the artistic one. First verify the required repetitions and vocabulary use without trying to judge beauty at the same time. Then read the entire draft aloud, marking tongue-stopping syntax, monotonous pacing, weak images, and accidental changes of tone. Ask a reader where the poem first feels inevitable in a good way and where it feels mechanically assembled. Revise the source language when later passages repeatedly fail; local repairs cannot always solve a weak initial vocabulary. Finally, test whether the last stanza alters the reader's understanding rather than simply demonstrating that all the pieces fit.
Interesting Facts
- Exact recurrence does not produce an exact emotional repeat. Context changes the listener. A line first heard as description may return as denial or prophecy after an intervening image. In performance, a pause or altered emphasis can make this change audible without changing the wording.
- Small grammatical words can be major creative resources. Articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns may look less vivid than image-bearing nouns, yet they often determine how many coherent relationships the recycled language can form. Their usefulness becomes especially clear when comparing polished poems with overly noun-heavy drafts.
- Lexical limitation can enlarge ambiguity. When poets cannot solve every transition by introducing a new explanatory phrase, existing words must acquire additional senses. This can create productive uncertainty, allowing an image to belong to more than one time, speaker, or emotional interpretation.
- The form can support both gravity and play. Rearrangement readily exposes puns, comic collisions, and absurd syntax, but the same process can enact fixation, memory, ritual, or grief. Tone depends less on the constraint itself than on the poet's diction, pacing, and willingness to control surprise.
- The conclusion need not behave like a summary. Familiar words can be reorganized into accusation, revelation, question, or unresolved echo. Readers often remember an ending when it makes earlier vocabulary seem newly charged rather than merely bringing the verbal exercise to a stop.
- Several examples teach more than one flawless-looking model. As you browse the poems in this collection, you may encounter strict, adaptive, lucid, fragmented, earnest, or humorous interpretations. Comparing them clarifies which effects arise from the shared framework and which belong to an individual poet's imagination.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form meet most powerfully when the poem's verbal returns embody its central experience. The possibilities below are not popularity rankings; they are themes whose emotional logic can benefit from recurring statements, restricted vocabulary, and meanings created through rearrangement.
- Memory and revision: A remembered scene rarely remains stable. Repeated language can suggest the mind replaying an event, while altered combinations expose omissions, doubts, or a later understanding that the original account could not contain.
- Grief and absence: Mourning often circles the same names, objects, and unanswered statements. The form's echoes can enact that circling, and its limited words can make absence palpable: the speaker must continue using what remains.
- Love, intimacy, and miscommunication: Partners may share vocabulary without sharing meaning. Recombined phrases can dramatize attraction, misunderstanding, remembered dialogue, or the unsettling gap between what was said and what was heard.
- Ritual, prayer, and meditation: Repetition can acquire ceremonial force, while subtle changes of order suggest deepening attention rather than simple restatement. Concrete images help keep the meditative voice grounded and prevent abstraction from becoming monotonous.
- Dreams and altered perception: Dream logic welcomes objects and actions entering unfamiliar relationships. The restricted lexicon provides coherence beneath the strangeness, allowing syntax to bend while recurring images keep the reader oriented.
- Conflict and competing testimony: A small set of words can be made to support sharply different claims. This makes the form well suited to arguments, public language, family disputes, or speakers who reinterpret the same evidence according to different needs.
- Nature and cyclical change: Tides, weather, migration, decay, and renewal already involve return with difference. Repeated phrases can mark recurrence, while rearrangement reveals how observer and landscape alter one another across the poem.
As you read the community poems, compare works that approach similar subjects. Notice how one poet makes repetition consoling while another makes it claustrophobic, or how the same kind of natural image becomes comic, ominous, or devotional. The theme may begin the poem, but arrangement, voice, and sound determine its final character.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a Paradelle lies between inevitability and discovery. Its words must return, yet the poem must not feel as though it is merely processing an inventory. A technically recognizable draft proves that the poet can operate within constraint; a memorable one persuades the reader that recurrence is the poem's way of thinking. The repeated language becomes psychologically or dramatically necessary. It may enact a speaker trapped in recollection, a ritual gaining force, a claim becoming doubtful through insistence, or an image opening into several interpretations.
Strong poems establish useful language without making that preparation conspicuous. Their early lines possess immediate sensory and tonal value, but their words also remain mobile enough to create later relationships. This double duty is crucial. If every noun belongs to a single fixed phrase, recombination may produce stiffness; if the vocabulary is chosen only for flexibility, the voice can become bland. Editors therefore notice diction that is both particular and versatile: words rooted in the poem's world but capable of changing grammatical role, emotional charge, or symbolic meaning. Sound matters as well. Recurring vowels and consonants can make transformed lines feel organically related even when syntax becomes surprising.
Weaknesses usually arise when the construction becomes more visible than the imaginative purpose. Forced inversions, filler words, and opaque clusters may reveal that the poet is solving locally rather than shaping the whole. Mechanical patterning can drain repetition of urgency, while over-explanation leaves too little for rearrangement to discover. Another common problem is insufficient development: several sections inhabit the same mood and scale, so the ending has nothing to reconcile or overturn. Predictability can also appear when every reused image retains its original meaning. The remedy is not novelty for its own sake, but purposeful change in context, voice, emphasis, or relation.
Individuality survives through decisions the shared framework cannot make for the poet: what deserves to be repeated, which ambiguities are welcomed, how much syntactic fracture the voice can bear, where humor enters, and what kind of closure the subject requires. One writer may prize lucid narrative consequence; another may build an incantation whose logic is sonic and associative. Comparing multiple community poems sharpens judgment because it separates structural resemblance from artistic success. Readers begin to hear when a strange phrase is expressive rather than forced, when an echo deepens rather than delays, and when the ending feels less like a completed puzzle than a thought that could only emerge from these returning words.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on an idea of what a Paradelle can accomplish. Compare how different writers handle returning phrases, lexical pressure, tonal shifts, and the final act of recombination. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a particular echo, image, sound, or turn that changed your reading.
Then try composing your own. Choose language you are willing to hear again, test how its meanings change in new company, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can extend the conversation while giving other readers another approach to compare, question, and enjoy.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently includes 313 Paradelle poems, offering many opportunities to compare how writers respond to the same demanding verbal framework. As you browse, consider how each poet interprets repetition, recombination, voice, and closure. Some poems may follow established conventions closely, while others may adapt or challenge them for a particular expressive purpose. Reading across the collection helps reveal both the form's shared pressures and the distinct artistic choices made within them.
Sub Categories
Definition | What is Paradelle in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.