In those ignorant olden days
Who would have wanted to be a whale?
Who threw that harpoon into my back?
Whales Cry Too (a Mariannet*)
I
Hear them cry
…..When horrific harpoons pierce their hides
…..My heart bleeds from inside
……….Seeing whales so cruelly killed
The name “Mariannet” was recently ‘coined’ by Paul (of Paul’s Poetry Playground)
>> [ Invented Poetry Forms – The Mariannet – Paul’s Poetry Playground ] for the previously unnamed poetic form that the poet Marianne Moore created to write her classic poem “The Fish” first published in 1918. The form was invented over a hundred years ago and is relatively unknown to most poets.
The mariannet is an isosyllabic rhyming poem, consisting of one or more five-line stanzas (quintains) with one syllable in the first line, three in the second, nine in the third, six in the fourth, and eight in the fifth and final line. The first two lines rhyme with each other, and so does the third and fourth, but the fifth is nonrhyming and does not rhyme with any other lines. Thus its rhyme scheme can be expressed as aabbx for each individual quintain (with x representing the nonrhyming line). In Moore’s original formatting of the form, the third and fourth lines were indented five spaces and the fifth ten spaces.
I have attached Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish”, below Lisa Hannigan’s music/video.