Though intended for the delicately humorous the triolet is sober-going enough to carry a thread of sentiment. Nothing could be daintier or more suggestively pathetic than these lines by H. C. Bunner:
"A pitcher of mignonette, In a tenement's highest casement: Queer sort of a flower-pot--yet That pitcher of mignonette Is a garden in heaven set To the little sick child in the basement-- The pitcher of mignonette, In the tenement's highest casement."
"Through the fresh fairness of the Spring to ride, As in the old days when he rode with her, With joy of Love that had fond Hope to bride One year ago had made her pulses stir.
"Now shall no wish with any day recur (For Love and Death part year and year full wide), Through the fresh fairness of the Spring to ride, As in the old days when he rode with her.
"No ghost there lingers of the smile that died On the sweet pale lip where his kisses were ... Yet still she turns her delicate head aside, If she may hear him come with jingling spur Through the fresh fairness of the Spring to ride, As in the old days when he rode with her."
This variant of the rondeau contains fourteen lines of which the first two are twice repeated as refrains. But two rhymes are employed.
"A voice in the scented night, A step where the rose trees blow,-- O Love and O Love's delight!
"Cold star at the blue vault's height, What is it that shakes you so? A voice in the scented night.
"She comes in her beauty bright, She comes in her young love's glow, O Love and O Love's delight!
"She bends from her casement white, And she hears it hushed and low, A voice in the scented night.
"And he climbs by that stairway slight Her passionate Romeo: O Love and O Love's delight!
"And it stirs us still in spite Of its 'ever so long ago,' That voice in the scented night; O Love and O Love's delight!"
The second lines of each stanza rhyme and the first and third lines of the first stanza are alternated as refrains.
The sestina has six six-line stanzas and an envoy: in the stanzas the final words of each line remain the same throughout, though the order is changed. In the three-line envoy the six words must appear again and in an established order. The sestina is a trifle too long to quote, but one of the best and sanest examples is to be found in Kipling's Seven Seas--"The Sestina of the Tramp Royal." Swinburne's sestinas though "poetic" are very cloudy in meaning.