The Spiral of the Pantoum

When reading about the Pantoum, an ancient form of Malay- Indonesian poetry I was immediately fascinated by the abab rhyme scheme. I didn’t understand it at first until I read my first Pantoum and saw this scheme with my own eyes. While reading these types of poems it is very easy to get lost in the form and repetition of it all unless you go back and look at it really closely. As this ancient form of poetry became modernized it became easier to understand “More importantly, the pantun is a popular form, used by common folk for a variety of purposes, to express love, lyricism, and other verities” (Gotera 255). The traditional pantoum was when “Both halves mirror one another: image and statement, scene and comment” (Gotera 254). The pantoum has no set restrictions on how many stanzas are in it, however it is usually normal to exceed more than two in order to interlock the ideas of the quatrains together. Because when this rhyming scheme comes to life it results in a abab bcbc cdcd form. This can help the reading by spiraling the main idea throughout the pantoum in order to tell the whole story clearly.

Citation:

Gotera, Vince. “The Pantoum’s Postcolonial Pedigree.” An Exaltation on Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Edited by Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes. U of Michigan P, 2002, pp. 217–222.