Writing Tragedies

Across the wide ocean
The poet voices penned, of old,
their plays with ice and cold
of Shakespearean gold, a crown
upon the kings renowned
falling poisoned, or drowned in lakes
or making dumb mistakes
until a jester breaks the mood
by doing something rude
that usually concludes with death.

note ▼

Lục bát is a traditional Vietnamese poetry form, that's part of the country's folk tradition. It actually translates to "six eight" in Sino-Vietnamese, we'll soon find out why.

So what do we need to know?

Structure:

It should consist of alternating lines of six and eight syllables. There's no set number of lines, but the poem starts with a six-syllable line and ends with an eight-syllable line.


Tones:

Vietnamese is a tonal language, which in poetry is categorized into flat and sharp tones. We'll try to mimic this in English.

For "flat syllables", I suggest to look for stressed syllables, downward tones, perhaps vowels like 'a' and 'o' . For "sharp" syllables, try light, upward sounds, without stress, and perhaps vowels like 'i' and 'e'. Use your own ear, try the words out loud.

The pattern should be:

_ Flat _ Sharp _ Flat (for six-syllable lines)
_ Flat _ Sharp _ Flat _ Flat (for eight-syllable lines)

Where _ can be any type of syllable.

Note: there are exceptions, but we'll skip those for now.


Rhyme scheme:

This is the fun part! The rhyme scheme for the syllables is as follows:

xxxxxA
xxxxxAxB
xxxxxB
xxxxxBxC
xxxxxC
xxxxxCxD
xxxxxD
xxxxxDxE
xxxxxE
xxxxxExF

You decide the length, it could be longer or shorter than above. There's another variant, but we'll stick to this one for now. Note: all rhymes are on flat syllables.


If you don't like reading schemes like above, don't fret, I'll post an example. You can research examples yourself too, just search for Lục Bát.