Over the pervious two posts I’ve explained how to write an American Cinquain as developed by the early 20th century poet Adelaide Crapsey. With the style of poetry being named “American” Cinquain or a Crapseian, then there must be other types of cinquain. I don’t plan to get into a lot of detail, but I thought it would be useful to give some information. You may have written a cinquain and not realized it.

Including the American Cinquain, there are six other styles traditionally recognized. Although I suppose there would actually be seven.

Standard Cinquain

This is the original five line stanza poem with no syllable restrains and included a rhyming pattern such as ababb, abaab, or abccb. The poems are usually made up of multiple stanzas. The Standard has its beginning in medieval France.

In the previous post I talked about the American Cinquain form created by Adelaide Crapsey and how it is a five line poem with a format of either syllables 2/4/2/8/2 or iambs of 1/2/3/4/1. You can try your hand with the first of our Cinquain Poetry Prompts that came out this past Monday. And don’t get concerned about iambs if you’re not a poetry nerd. Remember ‘nerd’ to me is a good word. Think of iambs as how many syllables are stressed in a line of poetry. Like in music there is something called meter or a beat. Or the tick tock of a clock and the tock is the stressed part. (I know, I’m over doing it. But I do that sometimes.)

Although syllables and iambs are important, the actual content is even more so. Nature. Emotions. Even an event. Here is my example:

OLD DAYS

See how
The sun rises,
Breaking over beauty,
Filling the senses with heaven
Then fades.

It can be nature, emotion, or an event. I didn’t plan for it that way. It just ended up like that after I finished and read it for the final time.

You see, the first four lines are all linked with a purpose. They are telling a story, feeling, or thought, building and building. Then in the final line, what I built is broken. Yes, there was a time where beauty and more would bring joy each morning, increasing each time, but in the end, it all fades away and I was left with nothing. This could be about a literal sunrise or perhaps a lost relationship.

It doesn’t always have to do with emotions. One reason Adelaide Crapsey’s poetry deals so much with emotions and her mortality was because of her tuberculosis at such a young age. She was only 36 when she passed.

Once you have your topic for your poem, write it. Then the work begins. The creativity begins. You look for the perfect word to give the most impact, to deliver as much of what you’re trying to relay. With so few lines and syllables, much like a Tanka, you need to be precise. Practice makes perfect. Althought, not every poem needs to be perfect. If you tried to do that, you might never share a poem with others because you’re afraid you didn’t achieve what you or others expected. Believe me, I know. I have dozens of incomplete poetry drafts sitting here in my blog I’ve never posted.

YOUTH

But me
They cannot touch,
Old Age and death … the strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk!

ROMA AETERNA

The sun
Is warm to-day,
O Romulus, and on
Thine olden Palatine the birds
Still sing.

NIAGRA

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water bangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

THE GUARDED WOUND

If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!

“The result is a form of poetry that is short, meditative, imagistic, and above all delicate—a quality regarded as beautiful in and of itself.” litcharts.com

© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.

With the new poetry prompt having started this past Monday, (Prompt #1), I thought I could share more about the Cinquain style, and more specifically the American Cinquain.

If you know a little about languages you’ll probably realize that ‘Cinqua’ means five.

Cinquains are, in their simplest form, poems of five lines or stanza. Yes, that’s a Quintet for you know-it-alls. We like to put formulas and rules to what we do, but the truth is that it’s as simple as that… Five Lines. But we like a challenge so we put constraints on what we do to get those creative synapses going. If that’s the right way of thinking about it. I’m not looking it up.

There are various types of cinquain, one of which is the didactic cinquain taught to school aged children.

If we were writing a cinquain instead of the American Cinquain, we would be using a rhyming scheme. You could do that with the American Cinquain, but it’s not how Adelaide Crapsey developed it. In some ways, the American Cinquain gives us more freedom to be creative.

If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you might know that Haiku has been a big part of its history. Guess what Adelaide Crapsey liked? The five line haiku poetry form called Tanka. Like a Tanka, the only true requirement of a Crapseian cinquain, yes that is another title for an American Cinquain, are the syllables.

2/4/6/8/2

Or is that the requirement?

You see, Adelaide Crapsey never wrote down what her style required. We only have a structure based on what others have come up with from studying her work. Not that they’re wrong. Some have stated the line lengths should be based on counting iambs or stressed syllables. How does that change the length from being syllables? It would instead be 1/2/3/4/1.

There is some evidence for the iambs idea, such as the following poem.

NOVEMBER NIGHT

Listen . . .

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees

And fall.

Basically, use what you like. That’s what Adelaide did.

Read How to write a Cinquain poem – Part 2.

© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.