Last month, NLP players were asked to write the second stanza of a villanelle. First, a quick recap of the rules of the villanelle, a most demanding form, which consists of 19 lines divided into five three-line stanzas, then a concluding stanza of four lines. Two of the lines are repeated four times each. Line one of the first stanza needs to be the last line of stanzas two and four, and the penultimate line of the poem. Line three needs to be the last line of stanzas three, five, and six. To make things even more complicated, the variable lines—the second line of each stanzas—must rhyme. Now, liberties are taken, can be taken, perhaps should be taken, with the form, but most of us elected to go for rhymes and iambic pentameter for this round.
I composed the initial stanza with a…
Last month, NLP players were asked to write the second stanza of a villanelle. First, a quick recap of the rules of the villanelle, a most demanding form, which consists of 19 lines divided into five three-line stanzas, then a concluding stanza of four lines. Two of the lines are repeated four times each. Line one of the first stanza needs to be the last line of stanzas two and four, and the penultimate line of the poem. Line three needs to be the last line of stanzas three, five, and six. To make things even more complicated, the variable lines—the second line of each stanzas—must rhyme. Now, liberties are taken, can be taken, perhaps should be taken, with the form, but most of us elected to go for rhymes and iambic pentameter for this round.
I composed the initial stanza with a view toward filling out the structure of a villanelle. The first line came easily: all monosyllables, an iambic pattern, an antithesis. To rhyme with “know,” I gravitated to “sorrow,” and with the third line I added folly and the image of a leap. I struggled before coming up with the middle line. The alliteration of f and p sounds; and the idea of adding fury to prayer, knowledge, sorrow, and folly; won me over. Some hours had gone by before the finished stanza materialized:
I pray, though what I pray for I do not know. Permit me please to deny the fury I fear. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
The redoubtable Millicent Caliban contributed two stanzas that impressed me greatly:
Yet rise again and trembling greet the morrow, dreading the judgment he is about to hear. He prays, though what he prays for he does not know.
He moves by stumbling where he tries to go. Does not get far but feels his goal is near. He prays, though to whom or what, he does not know.
I admired the narrative force of the lines, the high diction, and the allusion to Theodore Roehke’s villanelle “The Waking.” One of Roethke’s repeating lines is “I learn by going where I have to go”; compare Millicent’s “He moves by stumbling where he tries to go.”
**Emily **gets the silver medal for
I wouldn’t dream or dare or dream to throw myself into bridge-building. I cheer, I jeer, I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.
The repetition of “dream” in the first line is splendid. I applaud, too, the line’s alliteration and the clever enjambment at line’s end: the separation of the verb (“to throw”) from its predicate.
Easily the funniest, most charming entry comes from Paul Michelsen:
Anyone have an orgasm I can borrow? Love’s become like trading cards, my dear. I pray to the Patron Saint of I Don’t Know.
The pull-out-quote prize goes to Anna Ojascastro Guzon for “A Leap without a Safety Net,” which is an excellent description of both Kierkegaard’s leap of faith and the writing of a poem in an exigent form in 2025. Before she replaced* dive* with leap, Anna’s entry read, “A dive without a safety net below; / acceptance that attrition isn’t fair. / I pray, though for what, I don’t fucking know.”
I decided to put together a completed poem consisting exclusively of lines provided by NLP players. I took the title, “Prayer,” from** Michael Cooley**:
I pray, though what I pray for I do not know. Permit me please to deny the fury I fear. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow,
And the sage in the boat will forget how to row. What path can make the blossoms reappear? I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.
A leap without a safety net below: It reeks of history. I’ll need a spear. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
Near its end, a journey started long ago. But music, my God, and that chandelier— I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.
From the deep a chorus of hello, hello. From above they resemble a weird fishing weir. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
She bids him come, but he thinks he must go, Does not get far but feels his goal is near. I pray, though what I pray for I do not know. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
The authors are, in order, myself, Jim Richards, Christine Rhein, Anna Ojascastro Guzon, Emily, Pamela Joyce Shapiro, Amy Leigh Wicksm, Charise Hoge, Linda Marie Hilton, Michael C. Rush, and Millicent Caliban.
The prompt also inspired me to complete the villanelle with my own stanzas. Here is “Why I Pray”:
I pray, though what I pray for I do not know. Permit me please to deny the fury I fear. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
What’s the use of prayer? Better to throw A tantrum than resort to false cheer. Yet I pray, though for what I do not know.
Conferring with God I get to say hello. Is prayer just a way to ward off fear? The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
Though he may resemble the sick old fellow who dreams he is rich, virile, and cancer-free, he plays, he wagers, for stakes he doesn’t know.
Who is he? Or was he? It wasn’t easy to swallow The grief, though the liquor made it easier to bear. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
There are times when it’s a fool you’ll follow. Go to the stadium and drink buckets of beer. For you I pray, you whom I do not know. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
To all who contributed last month, whether a stanza, several stanzas, or a compete poem, I’d like to express my admiration and my thanks.
For next time, my prompt is to write a brief poem, whether in verse or prose, about a resonant mythic figure. Consider, for example, Kafka’s “The Sirens”:
These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.
The sirens in The Odyssey make a great subject, as do Prometheus, Don Juan, Andromache, Helen of Troy, Othello, Lady Macbeth, Apollo and Daphne, Moll Flanders, and Dorothea Brooke. Research is a good idea, and you may find refreshment in the depictions of Don Juan by Lord Byron and by George Bernard Shaw. Byron’s Don Juan, the greatest comic epic in English literature, gives us the great lover as a passive and rather innocent, if adventuresome, sort who is not the seducer but the seduced; Shaw, in Man and Superman, elaborated on this theme. Among those attracted to Prometheus, meanwhile, were Aeschylus, Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Kafka, and André Gide. As an added incentive, think of your poem as an exercise in instruction, a chance to educate as well as entertain the reader.
Deadline: two weeks after the day this post goes up.
David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, critic, and the general editor of The Best American Poetry annual anthology and author of the book One Hundred Autobiographies. He currently writes our Talking Pictures column.