Poet Alison Chisholm guides you through the language of poetry
The KYRIELLE is a French poetic form, its name based on the prayer format of the Kyrie eleison. It consists of any number of four-line stanzas in which a refrain is used. Usually written in iambic tetrameters, it has a rhyme scheme of either: a a b B c c b B d d b B or: a b a B c b c B d b d B.
These stanzas from John Payne’s poem simply called Kyrielle demonstrate the couplet rhyme scheme using a slight variant in the repeat, and a loose application of the metre.