This blog is for everyone who uses words.

The ordinary-sized words are for everyone, but the big ones are especially for children.



Saturday 18 July 2020

Saturday Rave: sevenlings.

Who invents something? The person who first makes it, or the person who first gives it a name?

The sevenling is a poem of, yes, seven lines. The lines come in two groups of three, and then there's a final line that traditionally acts as a punch-line.

The first sevenling was probably written by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, but the form her poem took was named by Roddy Lumsden and used by him as a useful template for teaching and imitation.

Here's Anna Akhmatova's original poem:

He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.

He hated children crying,
Old raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.

And he married me.



Akhmatova in 1922 (Portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin)

As one might expect from a woman who doesn't believe her husband loves her, things didn't go exactly smoothly.

Word To Use Today: sevenling. The word seven was seofan in Old English and goes right back to the Sanskrit word saptรก. The word-ending -ling is Gothic.

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are very welcome, but please make them suitable for The Word Den's family audience.