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The pantoum is a variety of formal verse that is distinguished by cycling refrains.  A refrain is a line that repeats itself.  Pantoums are written in quatrains, sets of four lines, that may be rhymed or unrhymed.

The first quatrain uses four lines that set up the pattern of the pantoum.

The second quatrain uses the second and fourth lines from the first quatrain as its first and third lines; these are the refrains.  The second and fourth lines of the second quatrain are new to the poem.

The third quatrain uses the second and fourth lines of the second quatrain as its refrains in the first and third line positions.  The third quatrain's second and fourth lines are new to the poem.

The fourth quatrain uses the second and fourth lines of the third quatrain as its first and third lines.  The second and fourth lines, again, are new.

And so on, for as many quatrains as you wish.

The pattern only breaks in the final quatrain.

The final quatrain uses the second and fourth lines of the preceding quatrain as its first and third lines, as usual, but for its second and fourth line it reaches back to the first quatrain and uses its first and third lines.  Except they're reversed.  That way the very first line of the poem becomes the very last line, which makes it all rather tidy.

Confused yet?

It's easier when you see some examples; take a look at the pantoums below.



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Poetic Form: Pantoum    

The pantoum originated in Malaysia in the fifteenth-century as a short folk poem, typically made up of two rhyming couplets that were recited or sung. However, as the pantoum spread, and Western writers altered and adapted the form, the importance of rhyming and brevity diminished. The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

The pantoum was especially popular with French and British writers in the nineteenth-century, including Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, who is credited with introducing the form to European writers. The pantoum gained popularity among contemporary American writers such as Anne Waldman and Donald Justice after John Ashbery published the form in his 1956 book, Some Trees.

A good example of the pantoum is Carolyn Kizer’s "Parent's Pantoum," the first three stanzas of which are excerpted here:

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don't they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

One exciting aspect of the pantoum is its subtle shifts in meaning that can occur as repeated phrases are revised with different punctuation and thereby given a new context. Consider Ashbery's poem "Pantoum," and how changing the punctuation in one line can radically alter its meaning and tone: "Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying." which, when repeated, becomes, "Why, the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying!"

An incantation is created by a pantoum's interlocking pattern of rhyme and repetition; as lines reverberate between stanzas, they fill the poem with echoes. This intense repetition also slows the poem down, halting its advancement. As Mark Strand and Eavan Boland explained in The Making of a Poem, "the reader takes four steps forward, then two back," making the pantoum a "perfect form for the evocation of a past time."


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