You can’t buy love, but that doesn’t stop anxious shoppers — laden with chocolate and cut roses — from trying. Hardly original stuff, and not particularly green in most cases either, yet the crass commercialism of the dreaded V(alentine’s) D(ay) often trumps our common sense. If you can’t avoid the holiday outright, you can at least approach it with some originality, with a good old-fashioned love poem. Hey, if it was good enough for Shakespeare…

Sonnet

Sonnets have comprised the benchmark of romantic poetry since their inception, probably in 12th century Italy. There are several forms of sonnet each with their own rhyme scheme and meter, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick to the familiar Shakespearean format: a fourteen-lined poem of three, four-line stanzas and a rhymed couplet at the end. The rhyme scheme is a simple abab, cdcd, efef, gg and each line has a meter of five stressed syllables (think oom-PAH, oom-PAH, oom-PA, oom-PAH, oom-PAH), aka the much-vaunted iambic pentameter.

Villanelle

There is something powerful about a well-chosen repeating stanza, as fans of the evocatively spare villanelle can attest. The best-known villanelle is probably Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”— but the oldest surviving example is a love poem penned by the form’s inventor Jean Passarat. A nineteen-line poem, the villanelle is broken into five three-line stanzas and a concluding quatrain. The rhyme pattern is aba aba aba aba aba abaa, and the final two lines of the poems are also the final lines of each stanza in a 1,2,1,2 rotation.

Ghazal

This Persian poetry form is traditionally devoted to the subject of longing. A series of stand-alone couplets, no fewer than five, no more then fifteen, the ghazal also uses repetition to drive home its impact. It’s a little more complicated than the villanelle in that the last word of the first line are subsequently repeated at the end of each successive even-numbered line, and the word that precedes this “refrain” is one which rhymes with the second to last word/phrase of each even-numbered line. The rhyme pattern therefore, (with R denoting the refrain word) is aRaR, baR, caR and so forth.

Of course if all else fails, there’s always free verse, but no matter which format you decide on, you’re bound to make an impression!