When Love Ends (Rhyme Royal)

The End of Love (Rhyme Royal)

Walking foolishly down a winding road
Blindfolded, nobody to guide you to
Where you need to go; slowly losing hope
The bells chime for a wedding, not for you

Abandon desire to face the truth
The day good mothers lay their babies down
Carelessly, shameless, upon sodden ground
_____
By Rain
_____
Form
The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a tercet and two couplets (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). This allows for a good deal of variety, especially when the form is used for longer narrative poems and along with the couplet, it was the standard narrative metre in the late Middle Ages.