The Triolet
In the matter of triolets Austin Dobson is again an authority, though his experiments in this form are scarcely as successful as his ballades and rondeaus.
“TO ROSE”
Austin Dobson
“In the school of Coquettes
Madam Rose is a scholar:
O, they fish with all nets
In the school of Coquettes!
When her brooch she forgets
’Tis to show her new collar:
In the school of Coquettes
Madam Rose is a scholar.”
Here the first line is also the fourth and the seventh, while the second is duplicated in the last. This is another of the two-rhyme forms.
The triolet seems simple enough, and, for that matter, a certain kind of triolet can be written by the ream. But to put the eight lines together in such a way that the refrain comes in freshly each time, is often a day’s work. In a much lighter vein it is permissible to pun in the repeated lines so that the last repetition comes in with a different meaning.
Though intended for the delicately humorous the triolet is sober-going enough to carry a thread of sentiment. Nothing could be daintier or more suggestively pathetic than these lines by H. C. Bunner:
“A pitcher of mignonette,
In a tenement’s highest casement:
Queer sort of a flower-pot—yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set
To the little sick child in the basement—
The pitcher of mignonette,
In the tenement’s highest casement.”
The Rondel