As far as I can remember, The Cross came out virtually fully formed. I’m sure I must have worked hard on it, but whether that happened in my brain working subconsciously before I put pen to paper, or with the usual scratching out and replacement of words before I typed it up, I don’t know.  

The rhyming scheme was set, as was the rhythm, from the first. It’s 28 lines long, but could just as easily be written as 14 longer lines. The lines in the verse are unusual, there are sets of lines that work together, as within an Italian sonnet, two 4 line sets make up the octet, and two 3 line sets make up the sestet. The pairs, their rhymes and meter follow a set form. The whole poem is in iambic form (Short-Long), but line length varies in a very specific manner.

First we have 4 sets of two lines, rhyming A-B-A-B-C-D-C-D. Each first line is iambic tetramer. Each second line is iambic trimester. So the first two lines, (with emphasis in Capitals,) are as follows:

 i STAND | upON | this LONE | -ly HILL |
		two BRO | -thers AT | my SIDE. |

Then there are 2 sets of two lines, each line in iambic tetrameter. They rhyme E-E-F-F. The extra foot in each second line, along with the rhyming of consecutive lines, has the tendency to make that section hurry along. Here’s the first set we encounter:

they PINNED | his PALMS | with CRU | -el NAILS, |
		they CARED | not FOR | the SCAR | -let TRAILS

After that, we repeat the pattern with anther set of 4 by 2, and another set of 2 by two, as above. The final two sets of two lines follow the pattern of the original 4 lines of the poem in both rhyme and meter.

I have not seen a poetic form of this type in my studies. Considering it as a 14 line form, it would have some relationship with the sonnet, with internal and end of line rhymes, but it would be more a second cousin than a sibling. Unless I can find something more similar, I’m calling it a double sonnet (copyright me, 1974)

The other poems followed a similar but not identical from - but hopefully they’ll all get reworked to be identical over the last few weeks of December 2022. 

Postscript: I updated this again very slightly in November, 2023 for posting on AllPoetry. As of 1 March 2024, the others are still in limbo, because Juliet died only a month later. But it did win an Honourable mention on 17 August in a contest.