Melancholic: From Marcel Proust's "For an Album of Melancholy: New Ballads from Macedonia" This is less a constraint and more a poetic form, but demonstrates what happens when particular poems are generalized. It consists of six stanzas. The first, second, fourth and fifth stanzas are four lines long. The third and sixth stanzas are six lines long. The syllabic structure of the poem is as follows: 6866 6866 586656 6866 6866 586656 Just as the Villanelle form invokes obsession through repetition, so too does this form: 1R13 2R21 3R1x23 1R13 2R21 3R1y23 The second line in each stanza, R, is a repetition of the same line verbatim. This line consists of an internal repetition of two four-syllable phrases which may be different from each other. All other numbers stand-in for repeated end-words. The lines marked x and y stand in for words which are not repetitions of any other word but are rhymes of one such word. These should always be proper names. There are two rhyming groups: {1, R, x}; {2, 3, y}. EG: Sometimes Wanna Go, Sometimes Wanna Stay And it could turn to gray And sometimes go, and sometimes stay Surfaces turned to gray Moving across, ergo A single drop, solo And sometimes go, and sometimes stay A traced path, so low Turned to a darker gray Mentioned it, ergo And sometimes go, and sometimes stay The sky kept turning gray At time pretend Combray In rooms left, so low Located there, ergo As unset concrete gray And sometimes go, and sometimes stay And looping off to gray And framed into "ergo" Rereading it so low And sometimes go, and sometimes stay And riding past, so low Through density of gray On this line, ergo And sometimes go, and sometimes stay Mixed up into gray Left to dry in Oslo Seaward left, so low Located there, ergo...