A pruning poem is a poem that uses rhymes that are prunings of each other.
Each rhyme word is one letter shorter than the rhyme word in the preceding line. Otherwise, they are the same word. Pruning could be accomplished by cutting terminal as well as initial letters, but initial position pruning is the more common and noticeable. While it is possible to write a pruning poem in couplets or longer, it is most effective when the reader sees the pruning on the page. Thus, George Herbert, who conducted many formal experiments in verse, writes Paradise as a pruning poem.
- What open force, or hidden charm
- Can blast my fruit, or bring me harm
- While the inclosure is thine arms?
Literary critic Joseph Summers suggested that the use of the pruning form in this poem in particular "compel the reader to 'see' what the poem is saying". Professor Janis Lull noted that it "reflects the influence of the traditional echo poem".
Another form of the pruning poem is the "diminishing" or "vanishing" poem, whereby each strophe has a decreasing number of words; an example of this form is "A Fit of Something Against Something" by Alan Ansen.
References
- Frye, Northrop; Baker, Sheridan; Perkins, George; Perkins, Barbara. The Harper Handbook to Literature (2nd ed). Longman, 1997, p. 380
- Swaim, Kathleen M. "Herbert's "Paradise"." George Herbert Journal, vol. 8 no. 2, 1985, pp. 19–31. doi:10.1353/ghj.1985.0008
- Quoted in Scott, Arthur. Current literary terms: a concise dictionary of their origin and use. Macmillan, 1967, p. 235
- Lull, Janis. The poem in time: reading George Herbert's revisions of The church. University of Delaware Press, 1990, p. 132
- Harmon, William. A handbook to literature. Prentice Hall, 2000, pp. 415–416.