Sing Out for Cinquain! by Lee Bennett Hopkins

This fascinating form of poetry can be made into much more than another lesson in grammar

The cinquain form has a fascinating history. Originated by Adelaide Crapsey, the cinquain, a delicately compressed, five-line, unrhymed stanza, contains 22 syllables and is broken into a 2-4-6-8-2 pattern.

November Night
Listen...
With faint dry sound
Like steps of passing ghosts
The leaves, frost-crisp'd break from the trees
And fall.

This perfect image of a November night, written by Crapsey, is one of 34 cinquain appearing in Verse (Knopf, 1915), a collection of varied work published a year after her death.

For more examples of Adelaide Crapsey's work, go to www.theotherpages.org.

Teaching the real thing
Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878, in Brooklyn Heights, NY. She attended Kemper Hall in Kenosha, WI, graduated from Vassar College and then returned to Kemper Hall to teach. After a year in Rome, she returned to teach at Miss Low's Preparatory School for Girls in Stamford, CT. In the remainder of her life, she fought a losing battle against tuberculosis and wrote and perfected cinquains.

Carl Sandburg immortalized her in his poem, "Adelaide Crapsey," which appeared in Cornhuskers (Harcourt, 1918) and then later in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, 1970). In his poem he reminisced, "I read your heart in a book."

Few contemporary poets for children write in cinquain. Kristine O'Connell George pens "Sketchbook on Easel" in Old Elm Speaks: Tree Poems (Clarion, 1998) and a double-cinquain, "Sleeping Outside," in Toasting Marshmallows: Camping Poems (Clarion, 2001). Over the years, the form has been reduced to lessons in grammar calling for lists of nouns, adjectives and participles. Sing out for cinquain – teach the real thing!

Reference shelf
Sky Songs by Myra Cohn Livingston (Holiday House, 1984). Fourteen exquisitely crafted verses in triple-cinquain format extol sky wonders such as "Moon," "The Planets" and "Sunset." This collection can be used with middle-upper grade students.

One At A Time: His Collected Poems for the Young by David McCord (Little Brown, 1980). Master poet McCord offers a lesson in "The Cinquain" in his classic collection of verse. Eighteen gems appear, ending in an invitation to "Try your/Hand at cinquains./They show their form, teach you/To be simple, direct, precise./Are you?"

Lee Bennett Hopkins is a celebrated poet and anthologist. His recent book of original poems is Alphathoughts: Alphabet Poems (Boyds Mills Press, 2003).