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A.Word.A.Day--triolet

triolet (TREE-uh-lit, -lay) noun

A poem or stanza of eight lines, having a rhyme scheme ABaAabAB, in which the first, fourth, and seventh lines are the same, and second is the same as the eighth line.

[From French, literally small trio.]

"The teaching of English has so degenerated these days that it's hard to believe that Ira's school curriculum included a rigorous training in classical verse forms such as the ballad, the triolet, the rondeau, the villanelle and the sonnet, but it did. In the first decades of the century the daily newspapers in New York were full of poetry, too: there were columns devoted to light verse, and often a theatre review or sports notice would be written in couplets or quatrains."
John Tranter, He's Got Rhythm, The Australian (Sydney), Mar 30, 1996.

The Canary Islands got their name from dogs, a light-year is a unit of distance, and a triolet is a poem of, well, eight lines. These are red-herring words that appear to mislead us in the beginning but if we look deeper everything becomes obvious. Triolets are so called because the key line in the poem appears thrice. Here's a lighthearted triolet by G.K. Chesterton:

I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs:
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jelly fish
That hasn't any cares,
And doesn't even have to wish
'I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs.'

Wish to write your own triolet? Help is near. For inspiration, check out these computing triolets written by MIT students. -Anu

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