Cinquain History & a #Cinquain, “Heed the Call”

Posted on by Colleen M. Chesebro

It’s always fun to learn a bit about the person behind the syllabic form. So, meet the creator of the Crapsey Cinquain:

Adelaide Crapsey

American Poet, Adelaide Crapsey, was born on September 9, 1878 in Brooklyn Heights, New York. She was “raised in a liberal environment that encouraged great expectations for women.” (Wikipedia.org)

Adelaide Crapsey did not invent the five line poem. As an early twentieth-century poet, she used a form of 22 syllables distributed among the five lines in a 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 pattern, respectively. Her poems share a similarity with the Japanese tanka, another five-line form, in their focus on imagery and the natural world. (Poets.org)

The cinquain, from the French, literally means a group of five. It is also called a quintain or quintet. It is a poem or stanza composed of five lines know as a:

Prosody

  1. a short poem consisting of five, usually unrhymed lines containing, respectively, two, four, six, eight, and two syllables. (Dictionary.com)

Cinquain.org shares the ingredients which make up the Crapsey cinquain and how has it’s evolved since her volume of poetry was first published in 1915. Please click the links to learn more…

To Center… or Not?

There is a debate as to whether or not Cinquain poetry should be centered on the page. Cinquains are a form of shape poetry. I prefer them centered because I believe the shape adds to the drama of the written poem. I’ve researched this question. There is NO hard and fast rule on this matter. So, do what makes you happy.

Cinquain Rules

Additionally, litcharts.com gives us more direction to the more modern versions of cinquain:

“The American cinquain is an unrhymed, five-line poetic form defined by the number of syllables in each line—the first line has two syllables, the second has four, the third six, the fourth eight, and the fifth two (2-4-6-8-2). They are typically written using iambs. Adelaide Crapsey’s “November Night” is a good example:

Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

“Some scholars define the line length of American cinquains by counting iambs or stressed syllables, rather than by counting total syllables. By this sort of counting, the proper line length of an American cinquain would be 1-2-3-4-1, since it would contain one iamb in the first line, two in the second line, and so on. The right way to count the line length is ultimately a matter of interpretation, though, since Crapsey never specified the rules of the form she invented.”

Confused?

Don’t be. Write your Cinquain following the directions. If you prefer to use the iambs, do that… just remember, different dialects pronounce things differently and will add the stresses in the way they speak.

Heed the Call, #Cinquain

Our world
must unite with
one mind – one consciousness
as light workers allied to save
mankind

©2020 Colleen M. Chesebro

Heed the call…

25 thoughts on “Cinquain History & a #Cinquain, “Heed the Call””

  2. I truly hope our world will heed the call of your cinquain. I enjoyed learning more about the cinquain. You note that different dialects pronounce words differently. I ran into that last night when I checked the syllable count of a new tanka on Syllable Counter. I pronounce “cruel” as one syllable, like “spool,” although when I checked the dictionary, it is indeed two syllables. I went thesaurus-hunting, couldn’t find a good synonym, and finally let “cruel” stand the way I pronounce it.

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