Does anyone know of a 10 line poem my friend could use for her class?

@jaketheripper Yeah I know, but shes really busy and doesn’t have computer access at the moment. And she asked for my help anyways.

….....that would be Korean poetry .... Hyangga

….... e.g….

There are also the decastich and several other types of ten line poetry. There are several poems listed at that site that may be of help.

Ten is unusual. Lots of eights and twelves and fourteens. If I were going to search this, I would flip through an anthology of poetry (anthology status indicates some level of renown) and just let my eye pick out the short ones, and then count.

@Jeruba ..... brilliant…..... <doh!> ...... I found only one….in an entire anthology book….. the initials of the poet’s name are ED and the initials of the title are WIIT ! . .... took about 5’.........

Emily Dickinson, I’m guessing. Yes, I’d have looked to her first if I were searching.

. . .Yes (30 seconds more), “What Inn Is This.” A well-known poet but not a well-known poem.

@Ailia, does it have to be a poem that’s complete in ten lines? A ten-line excerpt from a longer poem would be very easy to find.

Yikes, ten lines. Can she use an excerpt instead?

It took some doing, but I found this by Henry Taylor (who won the Pulizer for poetry, The Flying Change, in 1986). Ten lines is awkward but this has form and meter and is thus poetry.

ELEVATOR MUSIC

A tune with no more substance than the air,
performed on underwater instruments,
is proper to this short lift from the earth.
It hovers as we draw into ourselves
and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights
that count us to our various destinies.
We’re all in this together, the song says,
and later we’ll descend. The melody
is like a name we don’t recall just now
that still keeps on insisting it is there.

@Jeruba An example of a Korean Hyangga ( 4–4-2 form) from the reference link above follows, (...most dating back to about 800AD:

*On the hard road of life and death
That is near our land,
You went, afraid,
Without words.

We know not where we go,
Leaves blown, scattered,
Though fallen from the same tree,
By the first winds of autumn.

Abide, Sister, perfect your ways
Until we meet in the Pure Land.*

The book ‘An Introduction to Classical Korean Literature.. From Hyangga to P’ansori
, published 1996 M.E. Sharpe, Inc….... says

‘Even in translation the most poetic of the hyangga possess this exquisite suggestiveness. They seem perfectly poised between an apparent simplicity of language and an underlying sense of mystery. The poem that perhaps best exemplifies this quality of the hyangga is “Che mangmae ka” (Requiem), supposedly composed by Master Wolmyong in remembrance of his deceased sister.

Here the uncertainty and evanescence of our lives are compared to the leaves blown away by the first gusts of autumn. The first two lines of the poem are especially suggestive…...... more literally “The road of life and death/ Is here and now”). ”...etc…

Thanks everyone for helping me. @troubleinharlem No she cannot, although that would have been much easier. Thanks for suggesting it anyways. @gailcalled Thank you so much for the poem, my friend really appreciates it. And thanks @virtualist for your contribution too. The answers have all been wonderful. :)

And here are several by Ogden Nash; he wrote them to be read at each segment of Camille Saint-saëns’ –Carnival of the Animals–.

INTRODUCTION

Camille Saint-Saens
Was wracked with pains,
When people addressed him,
As Saint-Saens.
He held the human race to blame,
Because it could not pronounce his name,
So, he turned with metronome and fife,
To glorify other kinds of life,
Be quiet please – for here begins
His salute to feathers, fur and fins.

BIRDS

Puccini was Latin, and Wagner Teutonic,
And birds are incurably philharmonic,
Suburban yards and rural vistas
Are filled with avian Andrew Sisters.
The skylark sings a roundelay,
The crow sings “The Road to Mandalay,”
The nightingale sings a lullaby,
And the sea gull sings a gullaby.
That’s what shepherds listened to in Arcadia
Before somebody invented the radia.

THE GRAND FINALE

Now we’ve reached the grand finale,
On an animalie, carnivalie,
Noises new to sea and land,
Issue from the skillful band,
All the strings contort their features,
Imitating crawly creatures,
All the brasses look like mumps
From blowing umpah, umpah, umps,
In outdoing Barnum and Bailey, and Ringling,
Saint Saens has done a miraculous thingling.