Monday, March 07, 2016

Monday Poetry Stretch - Arte Mayor

I made an impromptu visit to DC to spend a few quality hours with my sister, so today I'm sliding in just under the wire with this week's stretch.

Arte  Mayor is a Spanish verse form. It is composed of an 8-line stanza with the rhyme scheme a b b a a c c a. Each line is composed of 12 syllables in two hemstitches. The lines use amphibrachic tetratmeter. This means the stress are on syllables 2, 5, 8, and 11.

You can read a bit more about this form at Encyclopedia Britannica and Poetry Magnum Opus. Note that this form is sometimes referred to as Copla de Arte Mayor. (Copla is the Spanish word for stanza, so arte mayor names the type of stanza.)

So, there's your challenge for the week. I hope you'll join me in writing an arte mayor. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

3 comments:

  1. I tried, but to no avail. I do see that this is a form really well suited to the many multi-syllabic words in Spanish that end in vowels, but I give up. Next week!

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  2. I'm struggling as well! At least you gave it a go.

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