'The Mouldering Boots of Other Days'

The triolet, like its cousins the rondeau, rondel, and rondelet, is an intricate French verse form, usually eight lines long and written in iambic tetrameter. The first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh lines. Among English-language poets, Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy wrote triolets, as have, more recently, A.E. Stallings and Dana Gioia. In a March 11, 1891 letter to his friend Arthur Gledhill, E.A. Robinson, age twenty-one, included a triolet: 

“Silent they stand against the wall,

The mouldering boots of other days.

 No more they answer Duty's call--

 Silent they stand against the wall,--

Over their tops the cold bugs crawl,

Like distant herds o’er darkened ways.

Silent they stand against the wall,

The mouldering boots of other days.”

 

Robinson adds, at least partially tongue-in-cheek: “Observe the bucolic pathos and fine feeling. The form of verse is of French extraction and if you ever study old French literature you will probably come across hosts of them. They give a man a chance to pour out his whole soul (as I have done) in eight lines.”

 

Robinson’s triolet stands as juvenilia and he never published it, but his technical feat is impressively elegant for so young a poet. Only the sixth line seems perfunctory, added to keep the rhyme scheme going. What makes it characteristically Robinsonian is the choice of subject matter: boots. Not new shiny boots but old ones already discarded. Like van Gogh, who often painted boots and shoes, we can’t imagine Robinson making his subject an elegant pair of dress boots, though we know he owned a pair.