triolet

This ingenious epistolary “novel” consists of the letters Shklovsky wrote Triolet during his political exile in Berlin.

Shklovsky, a literary critic who co-founded the Russian Formalist movement, was hopelessly in love with the writer Elsa Triolet.

A short poem, also called triolet, in which the first line or lines recur in the middle and at the end of the piece.

It would make a graceful, serio-comic triolet, he was thinking.

That is the precise sentiment of those who seek "to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be written."

The triolet consists (to quote Mr. Dobson) of eight lines with two rhymes.

The eight-lined rondel is thus, to all intents and purposes, a triolet, although labelled a rondel.