Rhyme royal (or rime royal) is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Contents
Form
The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a tercet and two couplets (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). This allows for variety, especially when the form is used for longer narrative poems. Along with the couplet, it was the standard narrative metre in the late Middle Ages.
History
Chaucer first used the rhyme royal stanza in his long poems Troilus and Criseyde and Parlement of Foules. He also used it for four of the Canterbury Tales: the Man of Law's Tale, the Prioress' Tale, the Clerk's Tale, and the Second Nun's Tale, and in a number of shorter lyrics. He may have adapted the form from a French ballade stanza or from the Italian ottava rima, with the omission of the fifth line.
James I of Scotland used rhyme royal for his Chaucerian poem The Kingis Quair, and it is believed that the name of the stanza derives from this royal use. English and Scottish poets were greatly influenced by Chaucer in the century after his death and most made use of the form in at least some of their works. John Lydgate used the stanza for many of his occasional and love poems. The Scottish poet Robert Henryson consistently used the stanza throughout his two longest works, the Morall Fabillis and Testament of Cresseid, while the anonymous The Flower and the Leaf is another early use of the form. In the 16th century Sir Thomas Wyatt used it in his poem "They flee from me that sometime did me seek", Thomas Sackville in the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, Alexander Barclay in his Ship of Fools and Stephen Hawes in his Pastime of Pleasure.
The seven-line stanza began to go out of fashion during the Elizabethan era but it was still used by John Davies in Orchestra and by William Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. Edmund Spenser wrote his Hymn of Heavenly Beauty using rhyme royal but he also derived his own Spenserian stanza with the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c-c partly by adapting rhyme royal. Like many stanzaic forms, rhyme royal fell out of fashion during the Restoration, and has never been widely used since. However, William Wordsworth employed rhyme royal (slightly modified by an alexandrine in the seventh line) in "Resolution and Independence", and notable twentieth-century poems in the stanza are W. H. Auden's Letter to Lord Byron (as well as some of the stanzas in The Shield of Achilles) and W. B. Yeats's A Bronze Head.
William Morris, strongly influenced by Chaucer, wrote many parts of The Earthly Paradise with the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-b-c-c and John Masefield used rhyme royal in some poems, including Dauber.
In United States Emma Lazarus wrote some short poems (inserted into the sequence Epochs) in rhyme royal.
Iambic pentameter
Each example below is from a different century. The first is from Chaucer who may have introduced the form into English. The second is from 15th century Scotland where the Scottish Chaucerians widely cultivated it. The third is from Thomas Wyatt who initiated the renaissance of English poetry.
(Describing the god Saturn hailing from an extremely cold realm)
Other meters
Although in English verse the rhyme royal stanza is overwhelmingly composed in iambic pentameter, occasionally other lines are employed. Thomas Wyatt used iambic dimeter in his Revocation:
Percy Byshe Shelley in his poem On an Icicle that Clung to the Grass of a Grave used anapestic tetrameter instead of iambic pentameter:
Other languages
Outside English-speaking countries rhyme royal was never very popular. It was used in French poetry in the 15th century. Sometimes it occurred in Spanish and Portuguese poetry. Saint John of the Cross wrote the poem Coplas hechas sobre un éxtasis de harta contemplación. Portuguese playwright and poet Gil Vicente used rhyme royal scheme in his Villancete (in the English translation by Aubrey Fitz Gerald Aubertine, the rhyme scheme of the original text is altered):
The villancete is similar in form to the Italian ballata mezzana (used by Guido Cavalcanti) or to the Spanish glosa. It consists of three stanzas: the first is a short envoi, followed by two seven-line stanzas.
A Danish poet, Adam Oehlenschläger used rhyme royal in one poem in his Nordens guder.
In East Europe rhyme royal is extremely rare. Polish poet Adam Asnyk used it in the poem Wśród przełomu (At the breakthrough). In Czech literature František Kvapil wrote the poem V hlubinách mraků (In Depths of Darkness) in rhyme royal.