Cinquain

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In poetry, a cinquain or quintain is a five line stanza, varied in rhyme and line, usually with the rhyme scheme ababb. An example of cinquain is the following stanza from Robert Browning's poem "Porphyria's Lover":

Murmuring how she loved me -- she
Too weak, for all her heart endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.

Cinquain also has a more specialized meaning. Under the influence of Japanese poetry, the American poet Adelaide Crapsey developed a poetic form she also called a "cinquain". Hers is a short, unrhymed poem of twenty-two syllables, five lines of 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables respectively.

Her cinquains were published posthumously in 1915 in her The Complete Poems. Cinquains became better known through the work of Carl Sandburg (Cornhuskers, 1918) and Louis Untermeyer (Modern American Poetry, 1919). Here is the Crapsey cinquain "Triad":

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow... the hour
Before the dawn... the mouth of one
Just dead.

During an episode of The West Wing, Leo McGarry indicates that the United States Supreme Court Chief Justice has "stayed too long at the fair" by citing a case decision written partially in cinquain: