Roundel (verse teaching)

The Roundel is one of the Anglo-Saxon literature Algernon Charles Swinburne developed poem .

Originally, the word roundel , derived from the Latin rondellus ("(metal) disc") denotes something round, a circle of people, hence a circle dance and from the end of the 14th century a short poem or song with a refrain, so the word corresponds entirely to the French rondeau .

Today we understand by Roundel , the form of poetry introduced by Swinburne in his A Century of Roundels . Such a poem has 11 lines in three stanzas with only two rhymes and the rhyme scheme

[abaR bab abaR]

Here, R denotes the rentrement : as with the rondeau , the corresponding French form, the first words of the first verse appear at the end of the first stanza and at the end of the poem. As an example of the form, the poem, entitled The Roundel , should serve:

A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
with craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.

Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught -
Love, laughter, or mourning - remembrance of rapture or fear -
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.

As a bird's quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A roundel is wrought.

a
b
a
R

b
a
b

a
b
a
R

The form was only adopted by a few successors, including John Davidson , Ernest Dowson , Sara Teasdale and Arthur Symons . The poet Christina Rossetti , to whom Swinburne had dedicated his collection, wrote several roundels, including a never published one in which she rhymed roundel with scoundrel ("villain").

literature

TVF Brogan, AL French: Roundel. In: Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman et al. (Ed.): The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012, ISBN 978-0-691-13334-8 , p. 1227 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
Rikky Rooksby: Swinburne in Miniature: "A Century of Roundels". In: Victorian Poetry Vol. 23, No. 3, (Herbst, 1985), pp. 249-265.
Joanna Swafford: Swinburne and the Möbius Strip: Circumvented Circularity in "A Century of Roundels". In: Victorian Poetry Vol. 51, No. 3 (Herbst, 2013), pp. 297–309, doi : 10.1353 / vp.2013.0019 .
Gero von Wilpert : Subject dictionary of literature. 8th edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-520-84601-3 , p. 709.

Web links

Wikisource: A Century of Roundels - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

↑ Geoffrey Chaucer The Knight's Tale (Hengwrt) (2003) v. 671: "Arcite hadde romed al his fille And songen al the roundel lustily." Cf. Oxford English Dictionary . 3rd edition 2011, sv roundel .
↑ Swinburne: A Century of Roundels . Chatto & Windus, London 1883, digitized .
↑ The word century does not mean the century, but the hundred , since the collection includes exactly 100 poems.
↑ Swinburne: A Century of Roundels . London 1883, p. 63 .

[1] Geoffrey Chaucer The Knight's Tale (Hengwrt) (2003) v. 671: "Arcite hadde romed al his fille And songen al the roundel lustily." Cf. Oxford English Dictionary . 3rd edition 2011, sv roundel .

[2] Swinburne: A Century of Roundels . Chatto & Windus, London 1883, digitized .

[3] The word century does not mean the century, but the hundred , since the collection includes exactly 100 poems.

[4] Swinburne: A Century of Roundels . London 1883, p. 63 .