A Triolet - Analysis

A Praise That Is Really a Sentence

Paterson’s central joke is also his central claim: the triolet is a verse form whose built-in cleverness doesn’t rescue weak writing; it amplifies it. The poem pretends to offer a recommendation—Commend me to the triolet—but every surrounding phrase poisons that praise. From the first line, the form is filed under the sickly forms of verse, and by the end it has become the feeblest jingle yet. The speaker’s voice is brisk, superior, and gleefully ungenerous, like a critic delivering a verdict he’s enjoyed reaching.

The tension that drives the poem is between the polite posture of endorsement and the actual content of contempt. Commend me reads like a toast, but the toast is being raised to something the speaker thinks deserves a reader’s punishment—beneath a reader’s curse. The poem’s surface manners and its real intention keep colliding, and that collision is what makes the sarcasm legible.

When Repetition Becomes the Evidence

The triolet’s defining feature—repeating lines—becomes Paterson’s argument rather than mere technique. The line Of all the sickly forms of verse returns again and again, and each return feels less like emphasis and more like being made to sit through the same complaint. That is precisely the point: the poem performs the wearying quality it attributes to the form. Even the refrain Commend me to the triolet comes back not as a renewed recommendation but as a kind of forced echo, as if the form compels the speaker to repeat himself until the reader shares his impatience.

In that sense, the poem enacts a small trap. You can’t get away from the line; you have to hear it again. Paterson turns the triolet into a demonstration model: if repetition is automatic, then a bad line doesn’t merely stay bad—it gets replayed.

Bad Writers, Worse Outcomes

The most cutting line is also the most practical: It makes bad writers somewhat worse. Paterson isn’t claiming the triolet ruins good poets; he’s saying it offers weak poets a gimmick that encourages them. The word somewhat matters: the speaker’s tone is controlled enough to sound judicious, but the overall judgment is merciless. The triolet is not just inferior; it is a machine for producing jingle, a word that makes verse sound like cheap noise rather than thought or feeling.

A Small, Sharp Question the Poem Leaves Behind

If the triolet is feeblest because it repeats itself, then what is Paterson doing by choosing it here? The poem suggests an uncomfortable possibility: that even a skilled critic has to borrow the very flaw he condemns in order to make the condemnation stick. The form is mocked, but it also gets the last word—twice.