From diary: wrote �Buffalo Gal� last night. Almost said �first Buffalo Gal� because she feels like a seriers. Someone on the Well says it is scrumptious and at is. Good feeling. Lay awake last night with the origianl sing-songing in my head and sequels chasing their tales. Didn�t get up though. Could slap myself. Always get up!
Today I spend some time with one sequel, and some time playing with yesterday�s poem. Did a rework to see how the seat-of-the-pants rhyme scheme I used turned out. Answer: almost regular, but not quite. Argh, I hate that. It's so tempting to make it fully regular.
(I am about to go on about this at length. Perhaps a cut tag...?)
It�s easier to see what I see if you break for rhyme (which I won�t do in any final version � I like the way the embedded rhyme swings the lines). Still:
Buffalo Gal buckles up her galoshes,
she puts on her coat from the surplus store.
She knows that the prairie watches and watches,
she knows that the sky is flung like a door.
She knows how to break the sod with a pickaxe,
she knows how to burn the chest-deep grass.
She has at her back the Roundheads and Cossacks,
she has in her eyes an endless roar.
She's dug into earth, she's built walls of grasses,
with snakes dropping through the roof in rain.
She's lost limbs to scythes, to scythes and cradles,
her sight to the sun, her men to grain.
Buffalo Gal goes out to the pasture
there's no one to go, no one left but her.
And now out of season the sheep are lambing,
and snow flies like sand before the storm.
She thinks that she hears an old tongue singing,
she thinks that her ears begin to warm.
(It's only the wind, that endless roaring --
Death leaves his boots at the lean-to door.)
That�s abab, cdcb, dexe, ff ghghg b -- with a few other sound conenctions I haven�t diagrammed, such as break/back and ears/hear. And it makes a difference that the H rhyme, warm/storm, is pretty darn close to the B rhyme, store/door/roar, and so is the F rhyme, pasture/but her � though in a different direction, such that F and H aren�t particularly close to each other.
It�s tempting, having started off with an heroic stanza , to try to pull the second two stanzas towards that standard as well. Alternately, the heroic stanza could be softened to a balladic stanza, with only one pair of end rhymes. The whole thing as a little leaning towards terza rima too, or to some other scheme that links the quatrains with rhymes shared between them , such as the Spenserian sonnet. Then the last stanza could fall out neatly as something pretty close to a sextent. Okay,
it�s actually eight lines. But as a unit with a different set of internal rhymes and something of a corner turning in it.
I think this may all go to prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I may only see if I can make �cradle� rhyme with something. Did anyone but me actually notice the rhymes?
(A quick overview of these terms (with which I�ve made somewhat free, ignoring the metrical requirements), is here.)
Yes, I did notice the rime--I heard store/door and when I got to "pickaxe", I waited. I'll admit, I didn't hear "grass" and began to wonder if I'd simply found something unintentional. Glad to know I was wrong and I love seeing how you are mixing "form" and "free verse".