by John P. Pratt
Unlike my mother, Kathryn Kay, I have only written a very few poems. Those few I have produced have nearly always included acrostics. At an early age my mother taught me that acrostics are poems with hidden messages spelled out according to some fixed pattern. The most common are to use 1) the first letter of every line, 2) the first letter of each word, or 3) the first letter of the first word, second letter of the second word, and so on. These fascinated me and I tried my hand at a few. One Mother's Day I tried to thank her by writing a poem with the most acrostics all at once that I could. I put five into a poem called "Mother." Most people can find four of them but the fifth is very hard. Can you find them all?
Later in life I learned about an ancient Hebrew poetry form called Chiasmus, which is found throughout the Old Testament. The form is not limited to poetry, but could also be used in prose. The form is that one states his story, thesis or poem in a way that builds to a crescendo, and then restates it all again in the reverse order. The name comes from the X-shaped Greek letter Chi, which reminds one of the form.
A few years ago, I noticed that the sonnet is particularly well suited to the chiasmus form, so I invented what I call the "chiastic sonnet." Sonnets always have 14 lines of iambic pentameter (meaning five sets of two syllables with the stress on the second). The usual sonnet has a rhyme scheme "abba abba cdcdcd" or "abba abba cdecde." That means that first line ends in a sound denoted by "a" and the second by "b" and then the third with that same "b" sound and the fourth with the "a" sound, so that the first and fourth lines rhyme, as do the second and third. The first two stanzas are nearly always the "abba" form, but there are many variations on the six-line stanza.
Note that the "abba" part is already a chiastic rhyme scheme because it forms an X shape. All that needs to be added is building the theme to a crescendo at the "b" areas, modifying the "cdcdcd" part to be "cdeedc" (making it chiastic) and then putting the six-line stanza in the middle, which also improves the chiastic form. Thus, the proposed rhyme scheme for the chiastic sonnet is "abba cdeedc abba."
So far I have tried my hand at three different forms of chiastic sonnets. The first one was written to my wife Ruth. It is one long chiasm of seven ideas, climaxing at the seventh, and then repeated in the reverse order. My second is written to my daughter Mary and has scriptures referenced throughout it rather than including an acrostic. It contains three chiastic stanzas, each building to a crescendo in the middle. My most recent attempt was written to my mother, whose maiden name was Kathryn Worsley, on her ninetieth birthday. It contains only two stanzas, which emphasizes both the chiastic form and the acrostic. Hopefully, you will try your hand at writing some too.