terza rima

Lo my lord no more words! to deeds to actions!
Waste not one more line, not one more syllable
No odes to beauty to gain my attention

If it is love or lust you feel, be sinful
Attract with a touch and be rewarded
desire is not a time to be sensible

I can see it in your eyes you are tempted
to slip between the saintly and the bawdy
wishes to bend and entwine and be knotted

If you like I will say that you challenged me
And like a maid did try to resist thy chains
by skill alone I am yours loyally

My part is played now yours is all that remains
Come here and full of the most wicked desire
together we shall feel fire within our veins

Then to darkness fade until next we conspire

Dante Alighieri created this style and it is first seen in his Divine Comedy. Boccaccio and Petrarch soon followed, Thomas Wyatt and Geoffrey Chaucer brought terza rima into English poetry in the 14th century. Terza rima is a style of poetry written in three-line stanzas linked by end-rhymes patterned aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe, and so on. There is no specified number of stanzas in this form, but poems written in terza rima usually end with a single line or a couplet rhyming with the middle line of the last stanza. The lines should be of the same length. There are no limits to the number of lines a poem composed in terza rima may have. Meter is not specified in terza rima, although many English poets use iambic pentameter.

Inspired by the poems of Italian Courtesan Veronica Franco, I wrote my own Tezra Rima. I used the hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) line common to Italian poetry and seen in the Divine Comedy. As my Italian isn't up to snuff yet I wrote it in English.