By Elaine Magliaro

I love it when life hands me a real situation that serves as inspiration for writing a poem. A few years ago my daughter’s  Yellow Lab Jack was taken to a special park where dogs are allowed to run around unleashed. Jack, as usual, acted up. He went into a muddy pond…and then refused to come out. I wrote a triolet about his experience.

DIRTY DOG

Dirty, dirty, dirty dog!
Didn’t heed your master—NO!
Thought you’d run into the bog.
Dirty, dirty, dirty dog!
(I rant in my mad monologue.)
You frolicked where you shouldn’t go.
Dirty, dirty, dirty dog!
Didn’t heed your master—NO!

The Triolet (From the Academy of American Poets)

The triolet is a short poem of eight lines with only two rhymes used throughout. The requirements of this fixed form are straightforward: the first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; the second line is repeated in the final line; and only the first two end-words are used to complete the tight rhyme scheme. Thus, the poet writes only five original lines, giving the triolet a deceptively simple appearance: ABaAabAB, where capital letters indicate repeated lines.

In his poem “How Great My Grief,” Thomas Hardy displays both his mastery of the triolet and the potency of the form:

How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
– Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Nor memory shaped old times anew,
Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee?

 Click here to see some more examples triolets.