Much as I enjoy the sharing of rondeaux (& I do), I was hoping we'd talk a little about some of the technical implications of the form. Even in Thomas M. Disch's article on the rondeau in <u>An Exaltation of Forms</u> (Finch & Varnes, 2002) he says little more than what it quotes from the Britannica: "the one great fault of the rondeau as a vehicle for deep emotion... the too frequent occurance of the rhyme..." He gives a quick summary of the form's history & his own personal experience in it, but not much in the way of counsel.
"Sonnets are harder to write," he says, but are more "...likely to produce work worth the price of a picture frame..." I'd go farther into this. In many respects, the rondeau presents the very opposite of the sonnet. Structurely, the sonnet is asymmetrical; its bicameral body breaks off-center, so that one call is answered by another, briefer counter-call. Strophe & antistrophe. The rondeau doubles back to its refrain, twice. The only other feature, its twain rhymes, forces the poem to go back over previous ground as well. The second stanza starts the first over again, rhymewise, though the refrain pulls it up short. Then, the third stanza tries again to repeat the first, getting all way through, this time, with a tie-in to the beginning. Head to toe. Its tail clamped in its mouth.
Even looking at the aabba stanza pattern, you can see the urge to turn back, the first couplet trying to make a comeback in the fifth line, as if there were some tension to keep bouncing from rhyme to rhyme in paired couplets until the end of time, or at least the rhyming dictionary. The rondeau is a mirror trying to catch a look at itself.
I'd also say that tetrameter lines accent this mirroring quality even more, as IP accents the asymmetry of the sonnet. Even if you break an IP line in the middle you get two unequal halves. Tetrameter allows the refrain to break the first line neatly in half. Isn't this just perfect for a form that's always doubling back to the beginning?
The "too frequent occurance of the rhyme" remains a problem, but it can also be a strength. In the Flanders Fields poem, the rhymes give a sense of the dead speaking, of fate turning us all under the soil. The refrain in that case is particularly weak; we don't discover new twists of meaning in the phrase "in Flanders fields," really, even if it gains something ominous as the speaker's grave.
I think a bigger built-in weakness, at least in most I've seen, is that the poet rarely plans for the third stanza as much as for the second. Most of the time the last stanza completely disappoints, either through not adding enough or through less intriguing rhymes (we tend to feel stretched in English by the third or fourth couplet in the same rhyme sound.) We need, if we're to make a really serious vehicle out of the rondeau, to treat that ninth-line refrain as we'd treat the volta in a sonnet. If the last stanza turns a new direction, we'd be less likely to see the form as a trifle.
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Unconnected questions: isn't the Dobson poem a lot like Vincent Voiture's 17th century poem "ma foi, c'est fait de moi, car Isabeau..." (My faith, it's done for me, for Izzie's asked me to make her a rondeau, putting me into extreme pain. What, thirteen lines...")? Isn't Billie Collin's sonnet on writing sonnets built on the same construction?
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