How to Write a Pantoum

This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate poets

There’s something very powerful about repetition, probably because of a psychological truth about the human brain.

Many studies have shown that we like and trust things that we’ve heard or seen before.

So when a poetic form repeats words or lines, it gains traction in the reader’s mind because the reader keep seeing things come back.

There are a number of poetic forms that rely on repetition of words or lines. The villanelle, the sestina, and the ghazal are all forms that do this, and you may well have used them yourself.

The pantoum is a repeating form that takes this to an extreme!

It’s not just some words or a few lines that reappear : in a pantoum, every single line gets repeated!

It’s also a form that’s less well known than the villanelle or the ghazal, so I’ll start from the beginning.

How a pantoum works

The pantoum is a poem of four-line stanzas.

It isn’t rhymed, and it doesn’t have any set lengths: the lines can be as long and short as you like, and the poem can have any number of stanzas.

The essence of the pantoum form is a pattern of repetition of lines.

In the first stanza, none of the four lines repeats.

After the first stanza, the repetition begins:

The first line of the new stanza is a repeat of the second line in the previous stanza
The third line of the new stanza is a repeat of the fourth line in the previous stanza.
The second and fourth lines of the new stanza are new lines, not seen before.

But then in the next stanza, those new lines come back as the first and third lines of the new stanza! So they get reused in their turn.

In fact, you could say the pantoum is the ultimate “environmentally friendly” form, because everything in it gets recycled!

How to make a pantoum opening

It can be a bit hard to understand this form unless you read it, so here’s an example.

Suppose I want to write a pantoum about selling my house.

First, I come up with a first stanza:

Not since we moved in has it been so clean:
toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic
till we see floors we barely knew were there.
The photographs make it look like a palace.

You might notice that I’ve tried to make each line its own separate unit of meaning. This is so that, when I repeat each line, it’s more likely to stand by itself.

To start the second stanza, I look at the rules, and see that the first line of the new stanza must be a repeat of line two from the first stanza:

Toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic

And then I make a new line that follows on from that:

Toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic—
it’s impossible to find a single thing I want.

Then line three brings back line four from the previous stanza:

Toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic—
it’s impossible to find a single thing I want.
The photographs make the house look like a palace;

Then I add a new line that follows on after that:

Toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic—
it’s impossible to find a single thing I want.
The photographs make the house look like a palace;
to me it feels like a cupboard empty of love.

Putting this together, I have (with the repeated lines in bold):

Not since we moved in has it been so clean:
toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic
till we see floors we barely knew were there.
The photographs make the house look like a palace.

Toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic—
it’s impossible to find a single thing I want.
The photographs make the house look like a palace;
to me it feels like a cupboard empty of love.

Now I can start a third stanza, using the underlined lines from stanza two as my first and third lines of the next stanza.

Another way to approach this is to write out both the repeating lines as soon as you start the new stanza.

So stanza three would initially look like this:

It’s impossible to find a single thing I want
[blank]
To me it feels like a cupboard empty of love
[blank]

The advantage of doing it this way is that it’s easier to see how your new line 2 might lead into line 3, instead of following on from line 1. Like this:

It’s impossible to find a single thing I want.
I search my heart for how it feels to leave:
to me it feels like a cupboard empty of love
where days ago there was enough for all.

How to finish a pantoum

Now, you may have noticed a problem! I said that every line in a pantoum gets used twice

But hang on—what about lines one and three of the very first stanza? Those were not re-used in stanza 2!

Where do they come back?

The answer is, at the end.

When you are ready to conclude your pantoum, the final stanza is composed entirely of repeated lines:

Line 1 of the final stanza is line 2 from the previous stanza.
Line 2 of the final stanza is line 3 from the first stanza.
Line 3 of the final stanza is line 4 from the previous stanza.
Line 4 of the final stanza is line 1 from the first stanza.

This way, not only do we use those two lines that hadn’t been recycled yet, but also we end the poem with a return to its opening.

This can be a very satisfying way to end the poem: it’s good to hear the opening come back, but it’s bound to sound different this time, because of everything else that has happened in the poem in between.

So if I choose to end my poem after stanza 3, the last stanza looks like this:

I search my heart for how it feels to leave:
till we see floors we barely knew were there.
Where days ago there was enough for all.
Not since we moved in has it been so clean.

Hmm—does this make enough sense? Not quite! And this is often the hardest part of a pantoum: weaving the lines of the last stanza into a whole, not a bunch of separate lines.

I think I’ll have to go back and adapt these lines some, so that they work both in the places where they first appeared, and here at the end.

How about this:

I search my heart for how it feels to leave:
blank floors I barely knew were there.
Where days ago there was enough for all
now the space I live in has been swept clean.

In the strict pantoum form, I now ought to go back and change those lines in the first and third stanzas, so they repeat exactly:

Now the space I live in has been swept clean:
toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic.
Blank floors I barely knew were there—
The photographs make it look like a palace.

Toys, books, chairs, beds, moved to the attic—
it’s impossible to find a single thing I want.
The photographs make the house look like a palace;
to me it feels like a cupboard empty of love.

It’s impossible to find a single thing I want.
I search my heart for how it feels to leave:
to me it feels like a cupboard empty of love
where days ago there was enough for all.

I search my heart for how it feels to leave:
blank floors I barely knew were there.
Where days ago there was enough for all
now the space I live in has been swept clean.

Developing the pantoum: repetition with changes

The problem with the pantoum is that the fixed repetitions can be stiff and unwieldy.

When you have to use the exact same line again, it can be hard to push the meaning of the poem forward. You have to make lines that will have meaning when surrounded by two completely different pairs of lines, and that’s not easy.

Of course, this aspect is part of the challenge of a traditional pantoum, and it may be a stimulating one.

But more commonly, modern poets have given themselves the freedom to change or adapt each line when it is repeated.

This makes it much easier to make each stanza meaningful.

In my example above, I would actually prefer to keep the original versions of lines 1 and 3 from my first stanza, and then have them change only in the final stanza.

So the first line would still be:

Not since we moved in has it been so clean:

But the last line would become:

now the space I live in has been swept clean.

As I said, this tactic is pretty common. Check out how flexible it the famous “Parent’s Pantoum” by Carolyn Kizer.

And here’s the opening of one of mine:

Strange that I should remember him so little –
Anyway, not him alone. Always in the forefront
Is my grandmother: acting up, making demands.
He is in the background, her modest frame.

I can’t ever picture him alone, in the forefront –
He always hid himself, even in death.
Just Grandad in the background. His coffin a modest frame
Of plain wood, holding memories I can’t bring back…

As you can see, I repeat only a word or two from each line, which allows me to change the meaning significantly if I want to.

What is the pantoum good for?

So, why should you put yourself to all this trouble? Why bother repeating all these lines when you could just say everything once?! Here are my thoughts.

The form is fun

It’s a creative challenge to reuse lines so often, and it can become a game—sometimes like playing chess against a grandmaster, but still, a game!

The form generates new ideas for you

When those lines come back, you have to dream up new ways of using them—and that can take you in some pretty wild and unexpected directions!

The structure is great for some topics

The repetitions create a slow, meditative space where thoughts keep coming back and back, and I think this lends itself to particular kinds of subjects. For example, it’s great for ruminations on memory, or any kind of reflective poem generally.

The structure can create some cool effects

The forward-and-back of the pantoum can be used to do interesting things.

My old teacher, David Morley, has used the pantoum extensively during his career, and he’s also given some of them a twist. For example, in “Sèsi o Lety U Písku.” This poem presents the speaker’s journey to a Nazi concentration camp for Roma people. “Sèsi” means voice in Roma, and every other line in this poem is spoken by a “voice” from the camp, or perhaps from the dead Roma. During the pantoum, the form means that every phrase is spoken once by the living, human speaker, and once (sometimes with variations) by the ghostly voice.

It’s a highly effective poem that always chills me, and it’s all down to the pantoum form.

But the best way to find out is to try it!

Really, it’s hard to explain the addictive appeal of a pantoum until you’ve tried one. So I hope you’ll do that now!

Next Steps: write a pantoum

To help you, I have a worksheet you can use to see where the repetition should go. Click here to access it!

And here’s a pantoum exercise.

Think of a topic you’d like to write on, or use this one: “ Lost.” Freewrite on your topic for a few minutes.
Using your freewrite, choose four phrases to be the first four lines of your pantoum.
Start your second stanza with inspiration from the second line of the first stanza. Are you going to repeat the whole line, or just some words? Think about what could follow on well from the end of the first stanza to help you make that choice.
After creating line 1 of stanza 2, what would follow on from that? Use this to create line 2 of stanza 2.
Then bring back line 4 of stanza 1 for line 3 of stanza 2. Will you use the whole line, or just a few words?
Finally, round stanza 2 off with its line 4.
Repeat this process for as many stanzas as you wish.
To end the poem, put lines 2 and 4 of the second-last stanza with lines 3 and 1 of stanza 1. Change them as much as you need to make sense.