Discovering Form (1)
Why Triads?
What is it about a defined, rather than organic, shape that attracts? In terms of the number of lines, triads aren’t new. A Handbook to Literature1 describes how 17th century poet Robert Herrick composed in tercets (three lines, all with the same end rhyme). In the same century Milton wrote terza rima (adopted from an Italian metre where the first and third iambic pentameter lines rhymed, and the second formed the rhyme pattern for the first and third lines of the next stanza). This form was popular also in the 19th century with Shelley and Byron. In the 20th century, MacLeish, Auden, and Eliot wrote triads as well, but with metrical variations and intentionally imperfect rhymes.
As a poet writing in 2023, I’m not aiming for the ornate. I want something fluid: lines as clean as modular furniture that blend the natural flexibility of free verse with the elegance of discipline. This wonderfully paradoxical combination I find in what Theodore Roethke described as continuing triads2 : free verse, yes, but where lines in a group of three either gradually lengthen, or gradually shorten. These expansions and contractions Paul Fussell likened to “the diaphragm of a camera lens [that] opens up to admit more light or closes down to exclude it.”3
How pleasing to build crescendos and diminuendos for the sensuous pleasure of their rising and falling within the ear, subtly intensifying or calming emotion, while the page mirrors how the ideas advance. I also like the wider religious, mystical, and familial associations of the number three, and philosopher Hegel’s Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, perhaps why my meditative poems more naturally emerge in this pattern.
However, continuing triads involve more than mechanically chopping text into units of three. Each triad, I believe, should contain all or a significant part of its essential idea, and not randomly spill strings of leftovers into the next.
I never plan in advance to compose in triads. My first drafts are amorphous messes. It’s only by playing with line, image, and sound that I glimpse a potential triadic shape and experiment further to discover if the rest of the poem can honour it. Some poems, however, remain adamantly free verse for their own unique reasons, which I respect.
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1. Thrall, William Flint, Addison Hibbard, C. Hugh Holman, eds., A Handbook to Literature. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1960.
2. Fussell, Paul. Poetic Metre & Poetic Form. New York: Random House, 1979.
3. Roethke, Theodore. “Some Remarks on Rhythm”, in Gary Geddes, ed., 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973.