Verse Craft

Verse Craft

Overview

Write, scan, and revise verse: fixed forms such as the limerick, sonnet, haiku, and villanelle; ballads and song lyrics; rhyming picture-book text; and verse that lives inside a story (a character's song, a prophecy, a skipping rhyme). Every claim that a line scans is shown, not asserted: the agent marks the stresses, counts the syllables, and labels the rhyme scheme so the author can check the work. The author's poem is the standard; propose changes, do not rewrite it wholesale.

Prerequisites

None. A standalone poem needs no project: save it where the user asks, as a plain .md file. Verse that belongs to a story needs the story project, story.md (POV, tone, era), and the file of the character who speaks or sings it.

When to Use

• Writing a new poem, limerick, song, or rhyme in a given form
• Checking whether an existing poem scans or keeps its rhyme scheme
• Fixing meter, forced rhymes, or padded lines in a draft poem
• Verse inside a story: a character's song, a riddle, a prophecy, an epigraph the author writes themselves
• Rhyming text for a picture book (plan the spreads with adaptation, write and scan the verse here)
• NOT for unintended rhymes or jingles in prose (use line-editing)
• NOT for permissions when quoting another writer's poem or lyrics (use editorial-review)
• NOT for a poetry collection as a story project: the CLI checks fiction entities, so keep a collection as plain files and do not run story init for it

Hard Rules

• Never say a line scans without showing its stresses (or, in another language's tradition, what that tradition counts). Mark them as in references/meter-and-scansion.md.
• Never pad a line to fill the meter ("did go", "so very", "oh", "all alone and lone"). Rewrite the line instead.
• Never invert natural word order to land a rhyme ("the sea so blue I wade into" for "I wade into the blue sea") unless the author's style already does it on purpose.
• Never reproduce copyrighted lyrics or poems, even a stanza. Allude or write something original in the same form; send permission questions to editorial-review.
• Never rewrite the author's poem wholesale without explicit permission. Propose line-level fixes with a reason each.
• Verse a character writes sounds like that character, not like a competent poet. A clumsy character's poem can be clumsy on purpose; say so rather than fixing it.

Workflow

1. Mode and constraints

1. Work out the mode: write new verse, critique a poem, fix a poem's meter or rhyme, or story verse that sits inside a chapter.
2. Pin the constraints, asking only for what the request leaves open: form, meter, rhyme scheme, line and stanza count, refrain, subject, tone, and any words that must appear. references/forms.md gives each form's rules; state the ones you are following.
3. For story verse, read story.md (era, setting, tone), the speaker's character file (voice notes, voice-words, voice-avoid, education), and the chapter it goes in. Verse must not state canon the project does not already hold: no new names, history, or world rules, and no small facts either (how long something has gone on, what goods come in, who signs for what). Comic verse reaches for these to fill a line or land a rhyme. Before drafting, list the facts the verse may use (names, objects, habits, running jokes the project states) and take every detail from that list.
4. Settle the language. For story verse it is language in story.md (a missing field means en); for a standalone poem, ask if the request leaves it open. Write and scan in that language's own tradition: syllabic (French, Spanish, Italian), quantitative (Classical Greek, Latin, Arabic), mora-based (Japanese), or tonal (Classical Chinese) verse is not measured in English feet. See "Verse in other languages" in references/meter-and-scansion.md and "Rhyme in other languages" in references/rhyme.md. The forms, examples, and forced-rhyme tells in the references are English; adapt them, and say when you cannot scan a tradition reliably.
5. For English, ask which accent the verse is scanned in when it matters (British and American stress differ on words such as address, garage, cigarette), and which dialect the rhymes must work in.

2. Draft

1. Draft for sense first: every line must say something a reader would say in prose. Then fit the meter.
2. Choose rhyme words that carry meaning; build the line toward the rhyme rather than bolting the rhyme on. See references/rhyme.md for forced rhymes and the rhymes readers have seen too often.
3. Keep the syntax natural. Read each line as a sentence: if nobody would say it that way, rewrite it.

3. Scan

Scan every line, including the author's lines in critique mode. Show a scansion table (format in references/meter-and-scansion.md) with the stress pattern, syllable count, and rhyme letter for each line, and mark each departure from the meter as deliberate (a trochee at the line start, a feminine ending) or a fault (a stress that falls on a weak syllable, a missing or extra beat).

When the user asks for the poem only, still scan every line and check the rhyme scheme before answering, then return just the verse and offer the table afterwards. Never return a line whose end word breaks the scheme or whose beat count breaks the form: fix it first.