Bob and Wheel

I found this form on the Writer’s Digest’s poetry site, where Robert Lee Brewer offered it as a stand alone quintain poem. I figured if it was good enough for Mr. Brewer, it was good enough for me. :-D

edited to add: I don't want to imply Mr. Brewer was giving us incorrect or misleading information about the bob and wheel, he just wanted to show it as a form in its own right.

This form actually surprised me. First of all, I thought it was a modern, invented form. And second, I thought it would be hard to find information about it. I was wrong on both counts.

Technically, the bob and wheel isn’t form on its own, but a device used in a longer poem. It’s usually found in Middle English and Middle Scots poetry, appearing at the end of a stanza. The “bob” is a short line that marks a transition between the rest of the poem and the “wheel.”

The most famous example of the bob and wheel is the epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I actually looked it up, and sure enough you’ll find it used at the end of every stanza throughout the poem. If you care to check for yourself, you can find an excellent translation HERE

For our purposes, it is a five-line stanza (quintain) or poem with a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-a. The first line (the bob) has two or three syllables, while lines two through five (the wheel) have five or six syllables. If you check out Sir Gawain, you’ll see that sometimes the wheel alternates five and six syllable lines, and sometimes they’re longer.

Using an even six-syllable line, for the wheel, the schematic would look something like this:

xa (bob)
xxxxxb (wheel)
xxxxxa
xxxxxb
xxxxxa

Easy peasy, right? And just to make it more fun, I did three verses in this style.


Kittens

They sleep
and wake to scurry
about the house, and leap
always in a hurry,
and often they will creep

and stalk
their prey – my stocking feet
or maybe they will walk
with faces oh, so sweet
then hop, as though in shock

and leap
and race around some more –
in anger, tails will sweep,
they wrestle on the floor
and then, they fall asleep.