A pruning poem is a poem that uses rhymes that are prunings of each other.
Each rhyme word is one letter shorter than the rhyme word before. Otherwise, they are the same word. While it is possible to write a pruning poem in couplets or longer, it is most effective when the reader sees the pruning on the page. Thus, George Herbert, who conducted many formal experiments in verse, writes Paradise as a pruning poem.
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- What open force, or hidden charm
- Can blast my fruit, or bring me harm
- While the inclosure is thine arms?
Pruning could be accomplished by cutting terminal as well as initial letters, but initial position pruning is the more common and noticeable.
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.