A cinquain is a five-line poem. The best-known kind, the American cinquain invented by Adelaide Crapsey, has lines of 2, 4, 6, 8 and 2 syllables, so the poem lengthens line by line and then stops short. The 34 cinquain poem examples below are twelve of Crapsey's own, from her book Verse (1915), thirteen new cinquains in her form, five didactic cinquains for the classroom and four variations: reverse, mirror, butterfly and garland. Each counts as one poem even when it runs to several stanzas, and poems shown together in a group share one note.
| Section | What you'll find | Poems |
|---|---|---|
| SectionThe cinquain format | What you'll findSyllables, stresses and what each line does | Poems— |
| SectionAdelaide Crapsey | What you'll findNovember Night, Triad, Niagara and nine more | Poems1–12 |
| SectionNew cinquains | What you'll findSeasons, the city, love and loss, work and writing | Poems13–25 |
| SectionDidactic cinquains | What you'll findThe word-count version taught in schools | Poems26–30 |
| SectionReverse, mirror and butterfly | What you'll findThe shape turned around, doubled and folded, one poem each | Poems31–33 |
| SectionA garland cinquain | What you'll findOne poem in six stanzas, the last built from the first five | Poems34 |
The cinquain format
| Line | Syllables | Stresses | What it usually does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line1 | Syllables2 | Stresses1 | What it usually doesNames the subject or gives an instruction: “Listen. .” |
| Line2 | Syllables4 | Stresses2 | What it usually doesStarts the description |
| Line3 | Syllables6 | Stresses3 | What it usually doesDevelops it, often with a comparison |
| Line4 | Syllables8 | Stresses4 | What it usually doesThe longest line: the image at full stretch |
| Line5 | Syllables2 | Stresses1 | What it usually doesThe turn: a stop, a reversal or a quiet blow |
The word is older than Crapsey's form. Before her, "cinquain", also called a quintain or quintet, meant any five-line stanza or poem, a shape English poets from Philip Sidney to George Herbert used with rhymes like ababb, and you will still see the word used that way. Crapsey's form is the one most people mean today. The Academy of American Poets describes it by its stresses, eleven of them in a 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 pattern, and the syllable count follows naturally when the lines are iambic. The stresses are the part to trust: as her own poems show below, Crapsey let the syllables vary when a line needed it. If stresses and iambs are new to you, our guide to meter in poetry explains how to hear them.
Adelaide Crapsey's cinquains
Adelaide Crapsey was born in Brooklyn Heights on September 9, 1878, graduated from Vassar in 1901, and in 1911 began teaching poetics at Smith College. That year she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After she collapsed in July 1913 she spent a year at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, and it was there that she wrote her best poems and invented the cinquain. She died on October 8, 1914, at 36. The Manas Press in Rochester published Verse the following year, and her study of English metrics appeared in 1918. She drew on the Japanese tanka and haiku, and the spaced periods in her poems, kept here as they were printed, work like the pause in a haiku.
Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.
| Line | Stresses marked | Syllables | Stresses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line1 | Stresses markedLis·ten | Syllables2 | Stresses1 |
| Line2 | Stresses markedWith faint dry sound | Syllables4 | Stresses2 |
| Line3 | Stresses markedLike steps of pass·ing ghosts | Syllables6 | Stresses3 |
| Line4 | Stresses markedThe leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees | Syllables8 | Stresses4 |
| Line5 | Stresses markedAnd fall | Syllables2 | Stresses1 |
Probably her best-known cinquain, and an exact 2-4-6-8-2. It opens with a command, holds the scene in the long fourth line, and gives the last two syllables to the leaves' fall. Notice that the sound comes before the sight: you hear the leaves before the poem says what they are.
These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow. . the hour
Before the dawn. . the mouth of one
Just dead.
A list of three that turns on its third item. Snow and the hour before dawn are beautiful silences; the third is a corpse, and the poem lets the line break hold it back until the last two syllables.
Look up. .
From bleakening hills
Blows down the light, first breath
Of wintry wind. . . look up, and scent
The snow!
Another command poem, and a rare happy one. The poem moves from sight to smell, and the snow arrives as a scent before it arrives at all.
Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk. . as strange, as still. .
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?
An omen. Four lines of a calm scene, then a question that turns it inward. Crapsey never says what the moth warns of, and the poem is stronger for it: the cold in the last line belongs to the speaker, not the weather.
How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.
The grammar saves the subject for the end: four lines describe something hanging over the falls before you learn what it is. Line 4 is three adjectives and nothing else, the slowest line in the poem right before the shortest.
I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.
A woman who no longer recognizes her own hands. The word "hands" appears twice and "these" twice, and the repetition sounds like someone turning her hands over, looking.
Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.
One simile stretched over the whole poem: "Still as… so still will be…". The image is lovely for four lines, and the last two syllables tell you what it was a comparison for.
Well and
If day on day
Follows, and weary year
On year. . and ever days and years. .
Well?
The last line is a single syllable, one short of the pattern, and the missing beat is the point. The repetitions (day on day, year on year, days and years) make the trap audible before the poem shrugs.
With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life.
Pain as a goddess flinging doors open. Count line 3 and you get seven syllables, not six, but it still carries three stresses (magnificent arm my pain), which is why it doesn't feel long.
The old
Old winds that blew
When chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep?
The repeated "old" across the first line break makes the winds older still, and "when chaos was" pushes them back before the world began. Against that scale, one person's weeping is the question.
The sun
Is warm to-day,
O Romulus, and on
Thine olden Palatine the birds
Still sing.
Spoken to the legendary founder of Rome, about the hill where the city began. The whole history of Rome fits into a cinquain because the poem picks one warm day and one sound.
If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!
Crapsey at her loosest: the syllables run 2, 4, 8, 9, 3. Read it aloud and the stresses still fall 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 (if it / were lighter touch / than petal of flower resting…), which is the clearest proof on this page that the form lives in its beats.
New cinquains in Crapsey's form
From here the poems are new, written for this page, and all of them keep the strict 2-4-6-8-2 count, counted the way most American speakers say the words: “every” as two syllables (ev-ry), “hours” and “our” as one. Say them otherwise and a line gains a syllable, which is one more reason Crapsey trusted the stresses. Like hers, each poem has a title, and in a poem this short the title works almost as a sixth line.
Seasons
March
The thaw
has reached the drains,
and every downspout talks
all night in water's one long word:
not yet.
July
Noon heat.
The hose left on
has drawn a dark green line
across the lawn to where the dog
lies flat.
October
Each night
the maple gives
a little more away,
and every morning, in the yard,
more light.
January
White fields.
A single crow
walks the length of the fence
as if it had been asked to check
each post.
Each one turns on its last two syllables. In "March" the thaw is talking, but the last line refuses spring; in "October" the loss of leaves is told as a gain. The crow is the only comic one, and the joke depends on line 4 taking its time.
The city and the everyday
Night Shift
At four
the bakery
is one lit window, warm,
and someone in a paper hat
waves back.
Laundromat
Round, round,
the dryers turn
a stranger's shirts to warmth.
I fold my own and watch the rain
let up.
Commute
Tunnel.
Our faces float
on the black glass like ghosts
until the train climbs into light.
We blink.
Crapsey's cinquains are mostly rural and set at night; these move the form indoors and underground. "Night Shift" never says "I waved". The baker's answer implies it, and the last line holds the whole human exchange.
Love and loss
First Date
Two hours.
The coffee's cold,
the waiter's stacked the chairs,
and neither one of us has said
good night.
Long Marriage
His cough,
her cough replies
across the dark: two clocks
that wound themselves together once
and stayed.
Anniversary
Your cup
still on the hook
by the window, the chip
turned to the wall the way you liked,
five years.
"Anniversary" only makes full sense with its title, which is exactly why Crapsey always used one. Without it, "five years" is a number; with it, the cup has been left untouched since someone died.
Work and writing
Revision
Page one
again. I cut
the sentence I loved most,
and the whole chapter, like a room,
breathes out.
Proofs
Galleys.
One last read-through.
I find it on page ten:
a typo that has waited there
three drafts.
Out of Office
Inbox:
two hundred twelve.
Outside, the river moves
the way it did before email,
unread.
Three for people who write all day. "Proofs" is set at the galley proof stage, the last read before print, which is where the typo always surfaces. In "Out of Office" the last word belongs to the inbox and the river at once.
Didactic cinquain examples
The didactic cinquain is the version most people meet in school. It counts words, not syllables, and gives each line a job: a one-word subject, two adjectives, three -ing verbs, a four-word phrase, and one word that renames the subject.
Thunderstorm
Loud, purple
Rumbling, flashing, drenching
The dog hides underneath
Applause
Library
Hushed, crowded
Browsing, borrowing, dreaming
Every shelf a door
Passport
Grandpa
Patient, whiskery
Whistling, fixing, fishing
Saves dessert for me
Pops
Volcano
Sleeping, enormous
Rumbling, smoking, erupting
Rivers of orange fire
Mountain
Monday
Gray, relentless
Commuting, emailing, yawning
Already wishing for Friday
Beginning
Set “Thunderstorm” beside “November Night” and the difference is structural, not just a matter of counting words instead of syllables. Crapsey's poem is a one-word command and then a single sentence that runs across the remaining breaks, so each line pulls you into the next, and its subject, the leaves, doesn't arrive until line 4. The didactic cinquain is five separate slots, each complete on its own, and it names its subject first. One builds toward a last word; the other circles a subject and renames it.
The structure is a recipe a class can follow: name it, describe it, show it moving, say something true about it, rename it. Two things lift a didactic cinquain above the worksheet. Line 4 works better as a small scene ("The dog hides underneath") than as a stated feeling, a bit of show, don't tell. And the last word is best as a metaphor or a surprise, like "Applause" for a storm or "Beginning" for Monday, rather than a dictionary synonym. Teachers can build a session around these with our lesson plan template.
Reverse, mirror and butterfly cinquains
Poets who took up Crapsey's form have built variations on its syllable pattern. Three you will often meet: the reverse cinquain (2-8-6-4-2), the mirror cinquain (a cinquain followed by a reverse cinquain) and the butterfly cinquain, nine lines of 2-4-6-8-2-8-6-4-2.
One wish.
She closes both her eyes and leans
across the cake, and blows
ninety small flames
to smoke.
The reverse cinquain spends its long line early, so the poem narrows as it goes. Here the shape follows the candles: the long breath in line 2, then less and less, then smoke.
Flood tide:
the water climbs
the pilings, plank by plank,
and lifts the boats as if to show
the sky.
Ebb tide:
the water lowers them again
into the mud, and takes
the light with it,
for now.
A mirror cinquain suits anything that rises and falls. The first stanza widens with the incoming water and the second narrows as it leaves, so the poem's outline on the page is the tide chart.
Each fall
the milkweed leans
under a weight of wings,
and one by one the orange sails
lift off,
south to a mountain none has seen,
on nothing but the air,
to find the trees
they know.
The butterfly folds at line 5, the short hinge between two wings of lines. Put the poem's turn there, as "lift off" does, and the second half can travel somewhere the first half only pointed to.
A garland cinquain
A crown cinquain is five cinquains read as one longer poem. A garland cinquain goes one step further: six cinquains, where the sixth is built from the others, taking line 1 from the first stanza, line 2 from the second, and so on to line 5 from the fifth. The sixth stanza has to make sense on its own, so it is the place to start planning.
The key
under the mat
where she left it for us,
the kettle cold, the calendar
on May.
Habit
still turns the lock
twice, the way she taught us,
then tries the handle, as she did,
for thieves.
We learn
the hollow sound
of rooms we emptied out:
bare walls that answer when we speak
too loud.
Her books,
her good blue plates,
the clock: we wrapped them all
and gave to strangers, box by box,
by noon.
We drive
away. The porch
light, on its timer, clicks
on in the window. Someone home:
she stays.
The key
still turns the lock
of rooms we emptied out
and gave to strangers, box by box.
She stays.
The bold lines are the ones the sixth stanza borrows. Written in that order, the garland gets its effect for free: each line means one thing in its own stanza and something heavier in the last, where the lock, the empty rooms and the strangers all point at the person who isn't named.
Cinquain, haiku and tanka compared
Crapsey learned from Japanese forms, and the cinquain is often taught beside them. They are easy to confuse and do different things.
| Form | Lines | Count | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| FormCinquain | Lines5 | Count2-4-6-8-2 syllables, 1-2-3-4-1 stresses | Where it comes fromAdelaide Crapsey, United States, 1913–14 |
| FormDidactic cinquain | Lines5 | Count1-2-3-4-1 words | Where it comes fromA classroom version of the form |
| FormHaiku | Lines3 | Count5-7-5 sound units in Japanese, often fewer syllables in English | Where it comes fromJapan, from the opening verse of linked poems |
| FormTanka | Lines5 | Count5-7-5-7-7 sound units in Japanese, 31 in all | Where it comes fromJapan, from the seventh century; the haiku keeps the shape of its first three lines |
| FormLimerick | Lines5 | Count3-3-2-2-3 beats, rhymed AABBA | Where it comes fromBritain, made famous by Edward Lear in 1846 |
The practical difference from the haiku is direction. A haiku sets two images side by side and lets the reader connect them, the juxtaposition explained in our guide to writing a haiku. A cinquain moves in one line of growth toward its fourth line and then cuts off, so it suits a single image that builds and a last word that lands.
How to write a cinquain
- Start from one moment
Pick one thing you noticed: a sound, a gesture, an object in a particular light. A cinquain has room for one image and one turn, and no more.
- Say it in one sentence
Write the moment as a single sentence of about twenty words. Most of Crapsey's cinquains are one sentence, and the line breaks fall inside it.
- Break it 2-4-6-8-2
Put the opening, often a command or a time ("Listen", "At four"), in the two-syllable first line. Let the image grow through lines 2 and 3, and give line 4 the fullest version of it.
- Make the last line turn
Two syllables that stop, reverse or reveal: "Just dead", "not yet", "waves back". If the last line only repeats what line 4 said, cut it and find the word the poem was heading toward.
- Count beats, then syllables, then title it
Read it aloud and mark the stresses: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1. Then count syllables, and if one line is off by one, decide whether the poem is better for it, as Crapsey sometimes did. Finish with a title that adds something the lines don't say.
You can ask the Strokes Assistant for a line-by-line syllable count of a draft, then recount any word like “every” or “fire” that speakers divide differently.
Frequently asked questions
Do you count syllables or words in a cinquain?
It depends on which cinquain you mean. Crapsey's form counts syllables (2, 4, 6, 8, 2) and, more reliably, stresses (1, 2, 3, 4, 1). The didactic cinquain taught in schools counts words (1, 2, 3, 4, 1) and gives each line a job, from a one-word subject to a one-word renaming. If an assignment just says "cinquain," check which one your teacher means.
Does a cinquain need a title?
Crapsey gave every cinquain a title, and in a poem of twenty-two syllables the title does real work: it can name what the lines hold back or change how the last line reads, as "Anniversary" does on this page. A didactic cinquain needs no separate title, since its first line already names the subject.
Does a cinquain have to rhyme?
No. Most of Adelaide Crapsey's cinquains don't rhyme, and the form is defined by its syllables and stresses rather than by a rhyme scheme. The older five-line stanzas also called cinquains often did rhyme, in patterns like ababb or abaab, so a rhymed cinquain is allowed, just not required.
