Monday Poetry Prompt

This week’s prompt: write an interlocking rubaiyat, sometimes referred to as rubai.

You might be familiar with the 12th-century Persian work, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It employs the Rubai. And without possibly noticing it, one of Frost’s well known poems (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) executes interlocking rubaiyat perfectly.

Here are the rules of the interlocking rubaiyat (link to Robert Lee Brewer’s website, featuring another example):

• The poem is consists of quatrains following an aaba rhyme pattern.
• Each successive quatrain picks up the unrhymed line as the rhyme for that stanza. So a three-stanza rubaiyat might rhyme so: aaba/bbcb/ccdc. Sometimes the final stanza, as in Frost’s example above, rhymes all four lines.
• Lines are usually tetrameter and pentameter.

Happy Writing!