My daughter, Sofrona, who lives in Utah, told me she is writing a rispetto every day this year.

“What’s a rispetto?” I asked.

She explained that it is a poem form that consists of two stanzas, each with four lines. The rhyme scheme for the first stanza is ABAB, and for the second, CCDD. Each line has eleven syllables. The form was popular in Tuscany in the 14th and 15th Centuries.

She was too shy to send me any examples of her rispetti, saying they were terrible. Of course they are terrible, I told her. What you are doing each day is writing a first draft of a poem. First drafts are supposed to be terrible. (She still wouldn’t send me any.)

I looked up the form and discovered that an eleven-syllable line is called
hendecasyllabic. That alone made me want to try my hand at it. To keep track of syllables, I created a document with the numbers one to eleven evenly spaced across each line and some blank space between lines for writing. This way I could stick a syllable under each number and know if a line was short or over.

I asked my daughter to give me a topic. She said unicorns.

What came to mind is a magazine cartoon I saw years ago. It showed Noah’s ark floating upon the flood, the vessel’s deck crowded with animals of every sort. On a lone mountain top stood two sad-eyed unicorns watching the boat drift away without them. This, I decided, would be the basis of my rispetto.

Even with my hendecasyllabic cheat sheet and my enthusiastic desires, I found the task difficult. I kept reprinting my numbers page and filling the spaces with syllables, using the margins to think of words that rhymed with, say, flood or rain or ark or boat or giraffes. The words boat and float seemed promising, and I tried to work them in as line-endings.

When finished, my poem turned out to be a poor retelling of not just the cartoon, but of a lyric by Shel Silverstein, who in the early 1960s wrote a song called The Unicorns. The song became world-famous in 1968 when it was recorded by The Irish Rovers.

The chorus of Silverstein’s song goes: “There was green alligators and long-neck geese. There was humpy-backed camels and chimpanzees. There was cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you’re born, the loveliest of them all was the unicorn.”

According to the song, the unicorns missed the boat because they were hiding and playing silly games. And their end is described like this: “And the water came up and sort of floated them away. That’s why you’ve never seen a unicorn to this very day.”

It was my intent to share with you my eight-line, hendecasyllabic unicorn poem. But try as I might, I couldn’t get it to be anything but a stilted imitation of Silverstein. And that’s why you’ve never seen a rispetto of mine to this very day.