Sunday Form Challenge - Yeats' Octaves

William Butler Yeats is a poet who needs no introduction. He is considered to be one of the foremost poets of the Twentieth Century. He is firmly established as a modern poet, yet he drew his influences from traditional Irish ballads and songs, writing extensively in rhymed verse. His earlier poems utilized quatrains, but for his later and most famous works, he preferred the octave as a stanza form.

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The Yeats Octave

The basic structure of this 8 line stanza is iambic tetrameter or pentameter (eight or ten syllable lines for those who do not feel comfortable working with meter), with the rhyme scheme:
a b b a c d d c. The poem may then consist of any number of stanzas.

This pattern can be seen in his poem, Two Songs from a Play, which explores the end of Greek paganism. I have reproduced the first stanza here.

I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play.

Ottava Rima

Yeats worked extensively with Ottava Rima in his later work. The significant difference between this and the previous octave form is the rhyme scheme, which is a b a b a b c c. Iambic pentameter is the favoured meter. This structure forms the basis of the stanzas in many of his poems, including Sailing to Byzantium.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —
Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


Our challenge this weekend is to create a poem, using either octave forms, of between one and four stanzas. The format challenge is posted on Saturday to allow for an extended period of time to work on a new poem. The Linky remains open, but you may prefer to link up on Monday instead. Please provide a link back to this challenge, if you do so. Only poems written specifically for this challenge may be linked up to this post.