| name | poetry-form |
| description | Poetic forms, techniques, and analysis for reading and writing poetry. Covers fixed forms (sonnet, villanelle, haiku, ghazal, sestina, pantoum), free verse and open form, prosody and meter (iambic pentameter, trochee, anapest, dactylic, spondee, scansion), sound devices (alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme schemes, enjambment, caesura), figurative language (metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, apostrophe), imagery and the image (concrete image, objective correlative, imagism), and the line as unit of meaning (lineation, line break, visual form). Use when writing poetry, analyzing poems, or working with compression and sound. |
| type | skill |
| category | writing |
| status | stable |
| origin | tibsfox |
| modified | false |
| first_seen | "2026-04-11T00:00:00.000Z" |
| first_path | examples/skills/writing/poetry-form/SKILL.md |
| superseded_by | null |
Poetry & Form
Poetry is language under maximum pressure. Every word carries more weight than in prose because there are fewer of them and each occupies a more conspicuous position. The line, not the sentence, is the fundamental unit. Sound matters as much as sense. Form -- whether inherited or invented -- is not a container for content but a participant in meaning. This skill covers fixed and open forms, prosody, sound devices, figurative language, imagery, and the poetics of the line.
Agent affinity: angelou (voice, rhythm, performance), woolf (lyric prose, imagery), le-guin (form as meaning)
Concept IDs: writ-poetry-forms, writ-figurative-language, writ-imagery-sensory, writ-sound-devices
Part I -- Fixed Forms
Sonnet
Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, organized around a turn (volta) where the poem's argument shifts direction.
Petrarchan (Italian). Octave (abbaabba) poses a question or situation; sestet (cdecde or cdcdcd) resolves or complicates it. The volta falls between octave and sestet.
Shakespearean (English). Three quatrains (abab cdcd efef) develop the argument; a closing couplet (gg) delivers the turn -- often an inversion, paradox, or crystallization. Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") subverts convention for twelve lines, then the couplet redeems it: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare."
Why it endures. The sonnet's proportions create a natural argumentative rhythm: assertion, development, complication, resolution. Fourteen lines is long enough to build an argument, short enough to demand compression. The volta is a structural enactment of thinking -- the moment where the mind changes direction.
Villanelle
Nineteen lines: five tercets (aba) and a closing quatrain (abaa). Two refrains: line 1 repeats as lines 6, 12, 18; line 3 repeats as lines 9, 15, 19. The obsessive repetition suits subjects of grief, rage, or compulsion.
Canonical example. Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night." The refrains ("Do not go gentle" / "Rage, rage against the dying of the light") accumulate force through repetition. Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" uses the form to enact the speaker's increasingly desperate claim that loss is manageable.
Haiku
Three lines: 5-7-5 syllables in English (mora-based in Japanese, a different measure). A seasonal reference (kigo) and a cutting word (kireji) that creates a juxtaposition between two images or perceptions.
Basho's frog. "Furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto." (The old pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of water.) The poem is not about a frog. It is about the relationship between stillness and interruption, silence and sound. The haiku's compression demands that the reader complete the experience.
