I Gymryd Anadl

Hello, all, and welcome to the calm eye of the hurricane!  Diolch yn fawr for putting up with my scatterbrained scheduling, too.  This week, I thought I'd give you a little breather in the form of our third building block, the Toddaid, a member of the awdl category.

A toddaid is a couplet of uneven length, often written in quatrain form.  It has an interlaced rhyme like our other formats, but this time the rhyme is found in the middle of both lines!  If the toddaid is extended into four lines, there is also an end rhyme formed by lines two and four.  Line one is ten syllables and line two contains only nine.  Here is one way to write it out:

xxxxA--xxx
xxxA--xxx

And in quatrain form:

xxxxA--xxx
xxxA--xxB
xxxxC--xxx
xxxC--xxB 

Thankfully, it looks a little easier written out this way.  This format is often written in conjunction with other meters, but can stand alone as well!  Once again, I found myself poking through the archives at Radical Druid, and found this example within a longer poem, "O Bard, Come Sing":

For we must not hide from the coming day,
locked away, far from the living earth;
The whole of humanity must be joined,
and each value the coin of rebirth.

He's made the decision to use the interlacing rhyme at the end of lines one and three, joining the stanza into a true quatrain.  This is a really (comparatively) flexible format to work with!

This week I'm going to leave this short and sweet, since I botched the scheduling.  I hope you enjoy the little break from the very strict format, because we'll head back into them next time.  I'm looking forward to reading your versions of the toddaid, whether in one couplet or several!

If you've been drawn into the thorny world of Welsh formats because of these challenges, well, you may have an inkling of where we are headed.  Rest assured that I am right behind you!