I shall be with you presently
When spring comes, I don't even jest
I long to hold you and listen, see
Learn what you've seen, hold to my breast
All this joy be held preciously
Softly playing, nature’s guitar strumming
Feelings blessed by such abundant hues
Hints of blue and blush, softly humming
Murmuring to the wind who’ll choose
To light the forest’s muse in joy so becoming
His fever broke her
With such lying charm
Her spirit woke her
To his mental harm
Left that sad joker
I know it's not iambic pentameter but I was intentionally going for a 5/5/ababa quintain and Sicilian was the closest.
Dreamily, she whiled the empty hours
with her little dolls and her crayon box.
She drew lonely princesses in towers,
hummed to herself, pulled up her socks,
and sketched a field of colorful flowers.
The forlorn blooms lay flat beneath her gaze.
She wondered, would it be as she had feared -
this would be one of those sad, hollow days.
Then, on the page, the sun and breeze appeared,
as lovely blossoms came alive, ablaze.
Such throaty timbres – oboes and bassoons –
such gowns! My Lady, apricot and plum,
her sleeves ablaze with blue October moons –
for one short night, her villa had become
the very essence of elysium!
To “fortify” us, as My Lady said,
against the winter tedium to come,
to banish melancholy, drive out dread,
she threw an Autumn Ball. Delirium!
We met the equinox with pipe and drum.
The quality of Florence all attended,
and never were Their Graces better fed!
The sun was up before our revels ended –
and Isabella? Still no thought of bed!
Three further galliards she’d yet to tread.
It seems I hear those trumpets even yet,
and taste the sweetmeats of that epic spread
(she’d plied us with light moscatel to whet
the palate) – I believe my mortal head
will throb for ever more, autumnal red!
When, in darkness, there's but a single ray;
When, in cruelty, there's little kindness found;
Then in imagination could I stay;
A private realm, and in perfection crowned;
And I thought of dreams, in that certain way.
When, in darkness, there shines a brilliant ray;
When, in cruelty, there is a kindness found;
Not in imagination would I stay;
Let private thought with purpose then be crowned;
And I think of dreams, in that certain way.
less sun, more moon as night time grows
seasons change as all things must
where did time go? Heaven knows
the stars give signs, much to tell us
be still, as nature all around us flows
They quickly pass, the waning days more brief,
like love once shied beneath a garish moon,
expose the truths betrayed by Autumn's thief.
Infatuation always ends too soon ~
still tethered to the oak, a hopeful leaf...
for Andrea's "Half Past Summer" Contest
King Sol is stealing all my energy.
There’s no relief in sight, forecasters say.
Come, clouds, with brief relief; this is my plea.
While summer lovers bask in heat each day,
I’ll dream of fall and trust in my AC.
How could I ignore the dance of a leaf
Cascading with warm summer brushed in gold--
Lovers tasting the quiet of relief
A contentment lit amidst north-winds cold…
And autumn comes...its charm and flair too brief!
Come, now while summer shall shine on your soul,
Leave off the darkness, the doubt and the fear;
Come, now the Earth’s with divinity full,
Leave off the wretched, and cling to the dear;
Come, now forgive, and thus make yourself whole.
Strands of silver clouds slowly drift away,
graze the ash of mid-summer smoky sky.
Two months on cold wind will blow in blue bay,
from the tawny trees golden leaves will fly,
as fall arrives spraying dew on the way.
Already in the shops, I bet:
the stuff for Halloween!
So as you sun yourself and sweat,
imagine witches, ghosts and all things mean -
although no trick or treaters yet!
The seasons operate like Nature’s clocks:
when winter solstice fades, we’re on the rise!
Meridian’s behind us now (approx),
so savour, while you can, those smiling skies:
then buckle up! Here comes the equinox!
“Beautiful poets, do proliferate worlds for us to slip into with each poem you create” by author
For all of you whose poetry is filled
with words that thrill like dancers on a stage,
you wonderfully show us you are skilled
by how you phrase each line on every page.
Inside our hearts your messages have been instilled.
Remember when you first made your debut,
utilizing different senses to impart
emotions that with imagery get carried through
to us - your audience -as wordsmith art.
Never stop amazing us with what you do!
Introduction
The special pleasure of this form lies in hearing a rhyme return after the poem has already begun to move away from it. That recurrence can feel like recognition, insistence, entrapment, or release, depending on what the poet places at the line endings. Within the compact five-line chamber, even a small shift in image, syntax, or tone can alter the weight of the final return.
As you read the community poems, expect variety in scale and temperament. One poet may capture a single charged instant; another may use several quintains to develop a scene, argument, memory, or meditation. The measured pulse can support dignity and reflection, but it can also sharpen comedy, accusation, longing, or conversational irony. Some writers may make the rhymes conspicuous and musical, while others may soften them through enjambment, understated diction, or less exact sonic echoes.
Reading one example can show how a particular poem succeeds. Browsing the collection reveals the wider field of choices: where poets turn the thought, how they distribute imagery, whether they make the middle lines resist the opening, and what kind of closure the returning rhyme produces. Compare poems that treat the last line as resolution with those that leave a question, contradiction, or emotional aftersound. Read beyond the first example, too. The form becomes more intelligible when several voices show how the same structural pressure can produce restraint, urgency, playfulness, or surprise.
Reading Guide
Read each poem first for its emotional or imaginative movement, then return to hear how the form shaped that movement. A Sicilian quintain can pass quickly on the page, yet its recurring sounds and measured lines create expectations that deserve a slower second reading. Compare several poets' approaches without treating technical regularity as the only standard. The more revealing question is whether sound, syntax, image, and closure cooperate to make the poem feel inevitable rather than merely assembled.
- Trace the opening promise. Notice whether the first line introduces an image, conflict, speaker, or proposition. Because the poem has little room to wander, that opening establishes a strong contract with the reader. When comparing community poems, ask: does the ending fulfill, complicate, or deliberately break the expectation created at the start?
- Listen to the rhyme relationships. The returning rhyme family can bind separated ideas together, while the contrasting family can create resistance or counterpoint. Ask which words are connected by sound and whether their meanings also converse. Does the rhyme deepen an association, or is it merely audible decoration?
- Feel the pulse beneath the sentence. A regular beat can lend authority, ceremony, tension, or calm, but expressive variations may make the voice sound more human. Read aloud and ask: where does the rhythm flow naturally, and where does a disturbance usefully emphasize a word or emotion?
- Watch syntax cross the lines. End-stopped lines make each unit feel deliberate and contained; enjambment can hurry the reader past an expected pause and reduce the sing-song effect of rhyme. Compare how different writers handle sentence boundaries. Does the line break create suspense, ambiguity, or a double meaning?
- Locate the turn. The poem may pivot through contrast, revelation, qualification, or a changed image. In such a compressed space, even a small conjunction can redirect the whole piece. Ask: at what moment does the poem become more than its opening statement?
- Examine the end words. These positions carry unusual sonic and semantic pressure. Strong poems choose words that sound natural in the sentence while remaining important to the subject. Ask whether the poet has earned each rhyme or distorted phrasing to reach it.
- Test the final line. Its sound may suggest return, but its thought need not be predictable. Compare endings that resolve with endings that reopen the poem. Does the last line merely summarize, or does it change how you understand what came before?
After reading several poems, revisit the ones that remained in your ear. Their memorability will often reveal how successfully formal expectation has been joined to an individual voice.
Writing Tips
Begin with pressure, not with a list of rhyming words. Choose an image, statement, memory, or encounter that can change meaning within a compact span. In workshop terms, the draft needs both a center and a turn: something worth concentrating and some reason the final line should not simply repeat the first idea. Let the structure help you discover the poem rather than forcing a finished thought into a decorative container.
- Choose material with a clear emotional hinge. A brief confrontation, remembered gesture, difficult choice, or observed transformation often supplies enough movement for one quintain. If the subject requires several stages, consider linked stanzas, giving each one a distinct task instead of stretching a single moment thin.
- Sketch the movement before composing the music. Write a plain prose sentence for what each line might accomplish: establish, extend, resist, turn, and alter. This is not a fixed template, but it prevents the common beginner mistake of producing five polished lines that never develop.
- Build a useful rhyme bank. Gather words connected to the subject, including verbs, concrete nouns, and words with more than one meaning. Avoid selecting a convenient rhyme first and inventing a vague sentence around it. The strongest end words contribute image or argument while carrying the sound pattern unobtrusively.
- Treat the pentameter pulse as speech under pressure. Draft sentences that a believable speaker could actually say, then refine their rhythm. Excessive inversions, filler words, and unnatural contractions may satisfy the count while weakening the voice. A controlled variation can emphasize a meaningful word, but an accidental stumble merely distracts.
- Use syntax to manage the rhyme. If every line ends with a complete grammatical unit, the poem may become overly predictable. Try carrying a sentence across a line so that the reader follows the thought before registering the echo. Balance this with strategic pauses where an end word deserves full emphasis.
- Give imagery more work to do. In a short poem, an image should not be a detachable ornament. Let it establish setting, embody emotion, and create the terms of the turn. Replace abstract declarations such as sorrow or beauty with details that allow readers to experience those conditions.
- Protect the speaker's individuality. Formal diction is not required merely because the rhythm sounds measured. Decide whether the voice is intimate, ceremonial, skeptical, comic, bitter, or meditative. Then test every word against that voice, especially words chosen chiefly because they rhyme.
- Make the ending transform rather than report. The final rhyme already supplies a sense of return, so the thought should offer more than a summary. Introduce a changed perspective, sharpen the conflict, or place an earlier image in a new moral or emotional light. Avoid adding a general lesson that the preceding lines have already implied.
During revision, read the draft aloud once while tapping the underlying pulse and once without counting at all. The first reading exposes rhythmic slips; the second reveals whether the poem still sounds like living language. Mark forced accents, weak end words, padding, and explanatory phrases. Then ask a reader to predict the final line after hearing the first four. If the exact conclusion is obvious, revise toward greater discovery while preserving the satisfying sense of sonic return.
Interesting Facts
- The dominant returning sound can change emotional meaning. Because one rhyme family frames the opening, middle, and close, it may suggest persistence, obsession, reassurance, or circular thought. The effect depends less on rhyme alone than on how the associated end words develop.
- Brevity does not require a single mood. A compact quintain can begin in praise and end in doubt, or move from complaint to reluctant acceptance. A carefully placed turn can make the final line feel much larger than the poem's physical size.
- Regular rhythm can intensify disturbance. When a poem establishes a measured pulse, a roughened phrase or displaced emphasis becomes especially noticeable. Experienced poets may use that contrast to embody hesitation, shock, anger, or a speaker losing composure without abandoning the larger design.
- Enjambment can hide the machinery. Carrying syntax across a rhyme boundary encourages readers to pursue meaning before pausing for sound. This makes the recurrence feel discovered rather than announced and can protect a serious poem from an overly singsong delivery.
- A sequence changes the role of closure. In a single quintain, the last line bears substantial responsibility for completion. In linked stanzas, each ending can serve as a provisional landing, allowing the next unit to revise, contradict, or broaden what seemed settled.
- Exactness and naturalness are competing virtues. A perfectly audible pattern may still feel weak if it produces strained grammar or predictable vocabulary. Conversely, softened rhyme or rhythmic variation can remain recognizable when the poem preserves the form's larger interplay of return, contrast, and closure.
- Comparison reveals interpretive range. As you browse the community poems, notice how similar formal pressures yield different speaking speeds, levels of formality, and kinds of endings. No isolated example can demonstrate all the ways the form can sound in practice.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form interact through pressure. The compact space favors concentration, while recurring sound can make an idea feel as though it returns changed by everything between its appearances. The themes below are literary possibilities rather than measured popularity rankings.
- Love and separation. Alternating sounds can embody nearness and distance, especially when the closing return recalls a person, promise, or absence. The form can hold tenderness and obstruction in productive tension without requiring a long narrative.
- Memory and recurrence. A remembered image gains force when its sound returns at intervals. Each recurrence can represent another approach to the past, allowing nostalgia to become regret, gratitude, doubt, or recognition by the final line.
- Choices and consequences. The poem's small scale suits a decisive instant: a word spoken, a road taken, or an action withheld. Contrasting lines can stage competing impulses, while the ending reveals what the speaker understands only after weighing them.
- Nature and seasonal change. Weather, light, tides, gardens, and migration provide visible transformations that can mirror the poem's sonic cycles. A concrete natural detail also keeps reflection grounded when the subject moves toward time, mortality, or renewal.
- Mortality and passing time. The measured pace can resemble deliberate contemplation, while the brief duration reminds readers that closure arrives quickly. A poet may use the final return as acceptance, protest, remembrance, or an unresolved echo.
- Portraits and dramatic voices. A speaker can reveal character through what is emphasized, withheld, or repeated. The discipline of the form is especially useful for monologues in which outward composure conflicts with anger, fear, vanity, or grief beneath the surface.
- Irony and reversal. The reader's expectation of sonic completion can be used playfully. A poet may establish a confident claim, undermine it in the intervening lines, and make the concluding rhyme expose the speaker's misconception or deliver a restrained punch line.
As you read the community poems, compare pieces that approach similar subjects. Notice how one poet may make love feel cyclical while another makes it final, or how the same natural image can support consolation in one poem and unease in another.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension is between compact completeness and genuine development. The pattern promises order: sounds recur, the pulse encourages balance, and the ending arrives with a sense of return. Yet a memorable poem cannot merely confirm those expectations. It must create enough movement that the return means something different when it comes back. The reader should feel both recognition and discovery. That double effect separates a technically recognizable exercise from a poem whose form seems necessary to its thought.
Strong examples make structure an active participant in meaning. A recurring rhyme might join words that expose a hidden connection, or it might trap a speaker inside a belief that the poem gradually questions. The measured rhythm may express self-command, ceremonial gravity, flirtation, or denial. When craft and subject reinforce each other, an editor notices that changing the pattern would alter the emotional argument, not simply the poem's appearance. Line endings become sites of consequence, and the turn feels prepared by sound, syntax, and image rather than inserted to provide a surprise.
Weakness often begins when compliance becomes the primary goal. Rhyme-first drafting can produce inversions, filler, generalized language, and end words that are audible but unimportant. Mechanical rhythm flattens emphasis by asking every phrase to march identically. Another frequent problem is over-explanation: the final line states a lesson instead of allowing the images and contrasts to resonate. The opposite problem is insufficient development, in which the poem offers five versions of one statement without complication. Predictability is not caused by regular form itself; it arises when the subject, syntax, and conclusion all move along the most obvious route.
Individuality remains visible through diction, sentence shape, imaginative logic, and the speaker's relationship to the pattern. One poet may let rhyme ring openly; another may subdue it beneath enjambed speech. One may use the pulse as composure, another as pressure against which emotion pushes. Browse the poems in this collection with these distinctions in mind. Comparing multiple community interpretations helps readers recognize that quality is not identical to rigidity. It lies in purposeful control: the poem understands the expectations it creates, uses them to intensify its subject, and leaves an aftereffect larger than its brief space.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before deciding what the form can do. Compare how different writers handle the opening promise, the turn, the recurring sounds, and the pressure placed on the final line. When a poem stays with you, leave a thoughtful comment identifying the image, rhythmic choice, or shift in meaning that made it memorable.
Then try composing your own Sicilian quintain. Let the pattern challenge your first phrasing rather than dictate your subject, revise it aloud, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can add another voice to the continuing conversation between shared convention and individual imagination.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 60 poems, offering multiple interpretations to read side by side. The range gives visitors opportunities to compare voice, pacing, rhyme handling, imagery, turns, and endings without assuming that one example represents the form as a whole. As you browse, keep in mind that poets may follow established conventions closely, adapt them for a particular expressive purpose, or challenge reader expectations while retaining a recognizable relationship to the form.
Quintain (Sicilian) Categories
Definition | What is Quintain (Sicilian) 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.