(Eng. and Fr. spelling pantoum ). A Malay verseform, usually in 4 but sometimes in 6 to 12 lines. The basis of the form is internal opposition, usually in two end-stopped couplets rhyming abab. The first couplet, the sampiran, tends to be highly charged and evocative, while the second couplet soars, sometimes obscurely, on the basis of the first: a M. proverb declares “a p. is like a hawk with a chicken, it takes its time about striking.” Western writers have necessarily altered and adapted the p. Introduced to the West by the Fr. orientalist Ernest Fouinet and established by the practice of Victor Hugo in his notes to Les Orientales, the form enjoyed a vogue in France and England in the later 19th-c. revival of Fr. fixed forms. In Fr. the form was effectively used by Thédore de Banville, Louisa Siefert, Leconte de Lisle (5 ps.), and, with considerable variations, by Baudelaire, in Eng. by Austin Dobson among others. As altered and adapted into these langs., the p. became a poem of indeterminate length composed of quatrains in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next, through the last stanza, where the first line of the poem reappears as the last and, in some Eng. pantoums, the third line of the poem as the second. Thus the pantoum begins and ends with the same line and, throughout, the cross rhymes scissor the couplets, different themes being developed concurrently, one in the first couplet and the other in the second of each quatrain. Brewster finds analogues to the p. in several European poetries.—Kastner; P. G. Brewster, “Metrical, Stan-zaic, and Stylistic Resemblances between Malayan and Western Poetry,” RLC 32 (1958); R. Étiemble, “Du ‘Pantun’ malais au ‘pantoum’ à la française
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