While people tend to make hard and fast rules about poetic forms, those rules often miss the mark in their attempts to quantify. For instance, Adelaide Crapsey, who first devised the cinquain, never wrote down rules for her poems. Over the years people have noticed that most of them have a 2/4/6/8/2 construction and decided this should become a rule. Here are two of Crapsey's cinquains that do not follow this rule:
The Guarded Wound
If it
were lighter touch
than petal of flower resting
on grass, oh still too heavy it were,
too heavy.

Fate Defied
As it
were tissue of silver
I'll wear, O fate, thy grey,
and go mistily radiant, clad
like the moon.

I have made a deliberate decision to place the word "I'm"
on the final line instead of the line above it. I realize this makes it 2/4/6/7/3, but if Crapsey's original cinquains
make such modifications, so can I.

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