Ottava rima is a
rhymingA rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
stanzaIn poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
form of
ItalianItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of
mock-heroicMock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature...
works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of
Giovanni BoccaccioGiovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...
.
The ottava rima stanza in
EnglishEnglish literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S....
consists of eight
iambAn iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable...
ic lines, usually
iambic pentameterIambic pentameter is one of many meters used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used...
s. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c
patternquote this will not help you at all with home work language practice week 7 msl students in 6th gradedo not use wiki for msl language practice week seven it will not help with unless we are doing stanza's and things...
. The form is similar to the older
Sicilian octaveThe Sicilian octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of eleven syllables each, called a hendecasyllable. The form is common in late medieval Italian poetry . In English poetry, iambic pentameter is often used instead of syllabics...
, but evolved separately and is unrelated.
Ottava rima is a
rhymingA rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
stanzaIn poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
form of
ItalianItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of
mock-heroicMock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature...
works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of
Giovanni BoccaccioGiovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...
.
The ottava rima stanza in
EnglishEnglish literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S....
consists of eight
iambAn iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable...
ic lines, usually
iambic pentameterIambic pentameter is one of many meters used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used...
s. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c
patternquote this will not help you at all with home work language practice week 7 msl students in 6th gradedo not use wiki for msl language practice week seven it will not help with unless we are doing stanza's and things...
. The form is similar to the older
Sicilian octaveThe Sicilian octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of eleven syllables each, called a hendecasyllable. The form is common in late medieval Italian poetry . In English poetry, iambic pentameter is often used instead of syllabics...
, but evolved separately and is unrelated. The Sicilian octave is derived from the medieval strambotto and was a crucial step in the development of the
sonnetThe sonnet is one of the poetic forms that can be found in lyric poetry from Europe.The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song". By the thirteenth century, it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme...
, whereas the ottava rima is related to the
canzoneIn music, a canzona was a 16th-century multipart vocal setting of a literary canzone and a 16th- and 17th-century instrumental composition...
, a
stanzaIn poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
form.
History
Boccaccio used ottava rima for a number of minor poems and, most significantly, for two of his major works, the
Teseide (1340) and the
Filostrato (1347). These two poems defined the form as the main one to be used for
epic poetryAn epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
in Italian for the next two centuries. For instance, ottava rima was used by
PolizianoAngelo Ambrogini, commonly known by his nickname, anglicized as Politian, Italian Poliziano, Latin Politianus was an Italian Renaissance classical scholar and poet, one of the revivers of Humanist Latin...
and by
BoiardoMatteo Maria Boiardo , was an Italian Renaissance poet.Boiardo was born at, or near, Scandiano ; the son of Giovanni di Feltrino and Lucia Strozzi, he was of noble lineage, ranking as Count of Scandiano, with seignorial power over Arceto, Casalgrande, Gesso, and Torricella...
in his 1486 masterpiece
Orlando Innamorato . The following year,
Luigi PulciLuigi Pulci was an Italian poet best known for his Morgante, an epic story of a giant who is converted to Christianity and follows the knight Orlando....
published his
Morgante Maggiore in which the mock-heroic, half-serious, half-burlesque use of the form that is most familiar to modern English-language readers first appeared. However, poets such as
Ludovico AriostoLudovico Ariosto was an Italian poet. He is best known as the author of the romantic epic poem Orlando Furioso . The poem, a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with...
and
Torquato TassoTorquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
continued to use ottava rima for serious epic poetry. It was later used in Italian libretti; perhaps the most famous example ends with the title of the comic
operaOpera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score. Opera is part of the Western classical music tradition. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
Così fan tutteCosì fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti K. 588, is an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte....
(1789).
In English, ottava rima first appeared in Elizabethan translations of Tasso and Ariosto. However, the form did not become popular for original works, and a section of William Browne's
Britannia's Pastorals is the only known original work in the form that survives. The first English poet to write mock-heroic ottava rima was
John Hookham FrereJohn Hookham Frere was an English diplomat and author.He was born in London. His father, John Frere, a gentleman of a good Suffolk family, had been educated at Caius College, Cambridge, and would have been senior wrangler in 1763 but for the redoubtable competition of William Paley; his mother,...
, whose 1817-8 poem
Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work used the form to considerable effect.
ByronGeorge Gordon Byron, later Noel, 6th Baron Byron, of Rochdale, FRS, and commonly known today as Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism...
read Frere's work and saw the potential of the form. He quickly produced
Beppo, his first poem to use the form. Shortly after this, Byron began working on his
Don Juan (1819-1824), probably the best-known English poem in ottava rima. Byron also used the form for his
Vision of Judgment (1822).
ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language...
translated the
Homeric HymnsThe thirty-three anonymous Homeric Hymns celebrating individual gods are a collection of ancient Greek hymns, "Homeric" in the sense that they employ the same epic meter— dactylic hexameter— as the Iliad and Odyssey, use many similar formulas and are couched in the same dialect...
into English in ottava rima. In the 20th century,
William Butler YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
used the form, with
half rhymeHalf rhyme sometimes called slant, sprung, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, off rhyme or imperfect rhyme is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved. Many half rhymes are also eye rhymes. Half rhymes are widely used in Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Icelandic verse...
, in several of his best later poems, including "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Among School Children".
Outside of Italian and English, ottava rima has not been widely used, although the
SpanishSpanish poetry is the poetic tradition of Spain. It may include elements of Spanish literature, and literatures written in languages of Spain other than Castilian, such as Catalan literature.See also: Spanish American poetry.-Early Middle Ages:...
poets Boscan, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga and
Lope de VegaFélix Lope de Vega y Carpio was one of the most important playwright and poets of the Spanish Golden Century Baroque literature...
all experimented with it at one time or another. It is also the meter of several medieval Yiddish epic poems, such as the
Bovo-BukhThe Bovo-Bukh , written in 1507–1508 by Elia Levita, was the most popular chivalric romance in the Yiddish language. It was first printed in 1541, being the first non-religious book to be printed in Yiddish. For five centuries, it endured at least 40 editions...
(1507-1508), which were adaptations of Italian epics. In Russia,
Pavel KateninPavel Aleksandrovich Katenin was a belated Russian classicist poet, dramatist, and literary critic who also contributed to the evolution of Russian Romanticism....
instigated a high-profile dispute on the proper way of translating Italian epics, which resulted in Alexander Pushkin's ottava rima poem "The Little House in Kolomna" (1830), which took its cue from Lord Byron's
BeppoBeppo is a poem by Lord Byron, written at Venice in 1817. Beppo marks Byron's first attempt at writing in the Italian ottava rima metre which encouraged his inclination for satiric digression...
. Pushkin's poem opens with a lengthy tongue-in-cheek discussion of the merits of ottava rima.
Some examples
From
FrereJohn Hookham Frere was an English diplomat and author.He was born in London. His father, John Frere, a gentleman of a good Suffolk family, had been educated at Caius College, Cambridge, and would have been senior wrangler in 1763 but for the redoubtable competition of William Paley; his mother,...
's
Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, commonly known as
The Monks and the Giants:
- But chiefly, when the shadowy moon had shed
- O'er woods and waters her mysterious hue,
- Their passive hearts and vacant fancies fed
- With thoughts and aspirations strange and new,
- Till their brute souls with inward working bred
- Dark hints that in the depths of instinct grew
- Subjection not from Locke
John Locke was an English physician and philosopher regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered the first of the British empiricists, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political...
's associations,
- Nor David Hartley
David Hartley was an English philosopher and founder of the Associationist school of psychology.-Early life and education:...
's doctrine of vibrations.
From
ByronGeorge Gordon Byron, later Noel, 6th Baron Byron, of Rochdale, FRS, and commonly known today as Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism...
's
Don JuanDon Juan is a satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womaniser, but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Modern critics generally consider it to be Byron's masterpiece. Byron completed 16...
:
- "Go, little book, from this my solitude!
- I cast thee on the waters – go thy ways!
- And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
- The world will find thee after many days."
- When Southey
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843...
's read, and WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
understood,
- I can't help putting in my claim to praise –
- The four first rhymes are Southey's every line:
- For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine.
External links