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.





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 saptá. The word-ending -ling is Gothic.