His demon struck in the dark. Bloodstained dirk,
Dirty work, easy mark,
Twice bitten by the loan shark.
Bad risk at rest in the park.
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Author Notes
The englyn is among the oldest indigenous verse forms in the Welsh tongue, dating back at least as far as the 9th century. It has been described as Britain's equivalent of the haiku.
It uses quantitative metres, involving the counting of syllables, and rigid patterns of rhyme and half rhyme. Each line contains a repeating pattern of consonants and accent.
There are about a dozen different variations of the form. This one is an englyn unodl union, the straight one-rhymed englyn, which consists of four lines of ten, six, seven and seven syllables. In the first line there must be a break after the seventh, eighth, or ninth syllable, and the rhyme with the second line comes at this break; but the tenth syllable of the first line must either rhyme or be in assonance with the middle of the second line. The last three lines must rhyme with the word at the break in the first line, and either the third or fourth line should rhyme on a weak syllable.
Some, like mine and the one in the image, were written in the form of an epitaph.
Image Credit: By Llywelyn2000 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35567050
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