The Pantoum

A poetic form built from interlocking quatrains: the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated verbatim as the first and third lines of the next, so the whole poem advances by reusing its own lines, and the closing stanza typically returns the opening line as its last. Because the surrounding lines change, a repeated line's sense can shift on each return through shifted punctuation, punning or recontextualizing rather than a change of wording. The form descends from the Malay pantun berkait, a chain of interwoven quatrains, which the French poet and translator Ernest Fouinet rendered into French for Victor Hugo's 1829 collection Les Orientales, after which French poets including Leconte de Lisle adopted it as a fixed form.