Forms

The Triolet

TRY-uh-lit (UK); TREE-uh-LAY (US)

Citation Formats

General Reference

Literature Atlas. "The Triolet." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-literature.interactiveatlas.org/forms/triolet.

APA Style

Literature Atlas. (n.d.). The Triolet. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-literature.interactiveatlas.org/forms/triolet

BibTeX

@misc{literatureatlas-the-triolet,
  author = {Literature Atlas},
  title = {The Triolet},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-literature.interactiveatlas.org/forms/triolet},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

A fixed French form almost always eight lines long, rhyming ABaAabAB, in which the first line repeats verbatim as the fourth and seventh, and the second line repeats as the eighth, so the opening and closing couplets are identical. It descends from medieval French poetry, possibly from Picardy, with the earliest known examples dating to the late thirteenth century, and belongs to the same family of French fixed forms as the rondeau and rondel, from which older writers sometimes did not clearly distinguish it.

Cross-Tradition Connections