A kind of script in which the heavy strokes are nearly upright, giving the characters when taken together a round look.
Word of the Day: Catachrestical
1. A species of lyric poetry so composed as to contain a refrain or repetition which recurs according to a fixed law, and a limited number of rhymes recurring also by rule.
2. See Rondo, 1.
Rondeau
Encyclopedia Britannica
RONDEAU or Rondel (Ital. Rondo). In poetry the rondeau is a short metrical structure which in its perfect form is divided into three strophes of unequal length, knit together by rapidly recurrent rhymes and a refrain. The laws of the rondeau have varied at different periods, and even with different poets of the same period—varied so fundamentally that some critics have found a generic difference between the “rondeau” and the “rondel” or “ron-det.” Rondeau, however, seems to be merely the modern spelling of the word rondel, as marteau is the modern spelling of martel, chateau of chatel, &c. When the rondeau was called the rondel it was mostly written in fourteen octosyllabic lines of two rhymes as in the rondels of Charles d’Orleans. In this variability of structure it contrasts with the stability of the Sonnet {<p.v.). While the proper sonnet of octave and sestet has always been a structure of fourteen verses (whatever may be the arrangement of the rhymes), the structure under consideration, whether called rondeau or rondel or rondet, may, it seems, consist of any number of verses from eight to thirteen. But when we find that the kind of triolet used by Froissart is a “rondel” we are compelled to admit that the names given to this form are very elastic. In Clement Marofs time, however, the laws of the rondeau became more settled, and, according to Voiture, in the 17th century the approved form of the rondeau was a structure of thirteen verses and a refrain.
AIa foy, c’est fait de moy, car Isabean M’a conjure de Iuy faire un Rondeau:
Cela me met en une peine extrême.
Quoy treize vers, huit en eau, cinq en ème,
Je Iuy ferais aussi-tôt un bateau!
En voilà cinq pourtant en un monceau:
Faisons en huict, en invoquant Brodcau,...
En puis mettons, par quelque stratagème,
Si je pouvois encore de mon cerveau Tirer cinq vers, l’ouvrage seroit beau;
Mais cependant, je suis dedans l’onzieme,
Et si je croy que je fais le douzième
En voilà treize ajustez au niveau.
Ma foy, c’est fait!
All forms of the rondeau, or rondel, however, are alike in this that the distinguishing metrical emphasis is achieved by a peculiar use of the refrain. Though we have the English rondels of Occleve and a set of rondeaus in the Rolliad (written by Dr Lawrence the friend of Burke, according to Mr Gosse, who has given us an admirable essay upon exotic forms of verse), it was not till our own day that the form had any real vogue in England. Considerable attention, however, has lately been given in England to the form. Some of the rondeaus of our own contemporary poets are as bright and graceful as Voiture’s own. Mr Swinburne, who in his Century of Roundels was perhaps the first to make the refrain rhyme with the second verse of the first strophe, has brought the form into high poetry.
Although the origin of the refrain in all poetry was no doubt the improvisatore’s need of a rest, a time in which to focus his forces and recover breath for future flights, the refrain has a distinct metrical value of its own; it knits the structure together, and so intensifies the emotional energy, as we see in the Border ballads, in the Oriana of Lord Tennyson, and in the Sister Helen of Rossetti. The suggestion of extreme artificiality—of “difficulty overcome”—which is one great fault of the rondeau as a vehicle for deep emotion, does not therefore spring from the use of the refrain, but from the too frequent recurrence of the rhymes in the strophes—for which there is no metrical necessity as in the case of the Petrarchan sonnet. “Difficulty overcome,” though a legitimate source of pleasure in French poetry even of the most serious kind (for the French language is essentially the most unpoetic in Europe), finds no place in the serious poetry of England.
In music the “rondo” seeks much the same effect as in poetry, the melodic emphasis of the refrain. The Italian composer Buononcini seems to have been the inventor of the rondo as thus understood.
9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 20, p. 840
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1. A small round tower erected at the foot of a bastion.
2. Same as Rondeau.
3. Specifically, a particular form of rondeau containing fourteen lines in two rhymes, the refrain being a repetition of the first and second lines as the seventh and eighth, and again as the thirteenth and fourteenth.
A tropical genus of rubiaceous shrubs which often have brilliant flowers.
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