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 You Can Write a Rondeau

You Can Write a Rondeau
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   high interest, readability grade 5
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   5.02

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    quatrain, unstressed, well-known, element, stanza, refrain, writing, underline, presented, poetry, phrase, ending, poem, scheme, stress, title
     content words:    In Flanders Fields, By Lt, John McCrae, In Flanders

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You Can Write a Rondeau
By Brenda B. Covert 		  
1     The rondeau is a rhyming poem that came from France. This form of poetry has an interesting pattern. There are three stanzas. Each stanza has a different number of lines! A rondeau begins with a quintet (5 lines), followed by a quatrain (4 lines), and ending with a sestet (6 lines). There are 15 lines in all. Included in those lines are two refrains taken from the first line of the poem.
 
2     The rondeau is usually written in iambic tetrameter or pentameter. Iambic means an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable. Two such syllables together are called a foot or a meter. Iambic tetrameter means that each line has four feet of unstressed/stressed syllables. Iambic pentameter means that each line has five feet of unstressed/stressed syllables. Don't let these definitions stress you out! Each line's meter can be presented with "ta TUM" for each foot.
 
3     The rondeau follows a precise rhyme scheme. There is one odd element to it. A few words are copied from the first line and used as a short refrain for the end of the second and third stanzas. The rhyme scheme looks like this: aabba aabR aabbaR. The "R" stands for the refrain.

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