Bob and Wheel: Poetic Forms
Poetic Form Fridays are made to share various poetic forms. This week, we look at the bob and wheel, an old school form that’s often part of a longer poem.
For years, I've been meaning to cover the bob and wheel. So I'm glad we're finally getting at it today. This form is most commonly associated with longer poems like "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," but I want to focus on it, for this post, as its own poetic form.
Here are the guidelines:
- Quintain (or five-line) stanza or poem
- Rhyme scheme of ababa
- First line of two to three syllables
- Lines two through five have six syllables per line
Simple as that.
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Play with poetic forms!
Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).
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Here’s my attempt at a bob and wheel:
Maybe Football, by Robert Lee Brewer
Football
season is nearly here
as we close in on fall
and folks begin to cheer
for the fun of it all.
Maybe
it seems too frivolous
to root on a pro team
to be victorious
for just some normalcy.
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
