This lovely spot is part of the Japanese Gardens located at Como Park in St. Paul, Minnesota. The terraced trees, the pond, the rocks and waterfall, all combine to provide a tranquil setting. I tried to capture that here in this poem.

This Poem is a Sapphic Sonnet.
I came across a Sapphic Ode Sonnet in my Sonnet research, but I found that one to not truly follow the Sapphic format, since it really was following an iambic model with a short 4th line. So, I wrote this one myself following the real quidelines of a Sapphic verse. So this Sonnet has the classic 14 line format of 3 Quatrains and a rhyming Couplet, but the meter follows the Sapphic structure as outlined below for a Sapphic verse.
The Sapphic Verse dates back to ancient Greece and is named for the poet Sappho. Sapphics are made up of four-line stanzas with three long lines, frequently of 11 syllables, followed by a short line of typically 5 syllables. The main building blocks of the Sapphic are Trochees and Dactyls. The Trochee is a metrical foot with one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, while the Dactyl contains a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones. The first three lines of the Sapphic contain two Trochees, a Dactyl, and then two more Trochees (making 11 syllables). The shorter fourth, and final, line of the stanza is called an "Adonic" and is composed of one Dactyl followed by a Trochee (making 5 syllables). Hence the syllable count is:
11/11/11/5 -11/11/11/5 -11/11/11/5-11/11
So, if you characterize a stressed syllable as "-", and unstressed as ".", the metric Sapphic line would be:
-.-.-..-.-.
and the Adonic would be:
-..-.

However, there is some flexibility with the form as when two stressed syllables replace both the second and last foot of each line.
While most Sapphic lines are unrhymed, because this is a Sonnet, I rhymed this poem in a classic scheme of:
abab cdcd efef gg.

This photograph was taken by the author himself on September 10, 2013.

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