How to Write a Pantoum: A Practical Guide with Example Lines

A pantoum is a poem that keeps interrupting itself, politely. It moves in four-line stanzas, and the second and fourth lines of each one walk into the next stanza and sit down in the first and third seats. Nothing gets thrown away. By the final stanza the poem has folded back on its opening, and lines you wrote as scene-setting now land like verdicts. The form reached English through the Malay pantun by way of nineteenth-century French poets, and it has lasted because it does something a rhyme scheme can't: it changes a sentence's meaning without changing a word of it.

What the Repetition Is Actually For

The pantoum is not a puzzle to solve. It's a machine for making one line mean two things.

Put "I'll be home by six" in the first stanza and it reads as a promise. Put the same line four stanzas later, after a hospital corridor and a stopped clock, and it reads as an excuse, or a lie, or grief. You didn't touch it. The context did the work. That drift is the real subject of every good pantoum, and it's what you should be aiming at from the first line you write.

Two practical notes before you start. Traditional pantoums rhyme on an abab pattern in each quatrain, but plenty of English-language ones don't rhyme at all, or rhyme only by accident. English has fewer easy rhymes than French, and forcing them tends to flatten the lines. Unrhymed is a legitimate choice. So is a loose, slant-rhymed version. Most pantoums run four to six quatrains; longer ones exist and tend to sag in the middle.

The Pattern, Line by Line

Give every line a letter and the structure becomes obvious. A and C are the two lines from your opening stanza that will return at the very end; B and D are the ones that get passed forward immediately.

1. Stanza 1: A, B, C, D
2. Stanza 2: B, E, D, F — B and D arrive from stanza 1; E and F are new
3. Stanza 3: E, G, F, H — E and F arrive from stanza 2; G and H are new
4. Stanza 4: G, I, H, J — and so on
5. Final stanza: X, A, Y, C — X and Y come from the stanza before, and A and C close the circle

Line C ends the poem. Line A, which opened it, reappears as the second line of the last stanza. Some poets go further and repeat A as the very last line as well, so the poem ends where it began; others finish with a couplet made of A and C. Both are accepted variants. Read a few published pantoums and you'll see the same small negotiations with the rule.

A Worksheet for the First Draft

Don't write a pantoum from the top down. Write a pile of lines, then assemble. Try this order:

1. Pick something that returns. A weekly phone call. A bus route. A kitchen you keep cleaning. The form rewards subjects with recurrence built in, because repetition feels earned rather than ornamental.
2. Draft eight to ten loose lines on that subject — not a stanza, just lines. Fragments, images, overheard sentences. Quantity matters more than polish here.
3. Test each line alone. Cover the lines around it and read it aloud. If it needs a neighbour to make sense, rewrite it until it stands up by itself.
4. Choose your opening quatrain. Two of those four lines (positions 1 and 3) will be heard again at the end, so pick lines you can stand to revisit.
5. Copy up, then fill in. For each new stanza, paste lines 2 and 4 from the stanza above into slots 1 and 3. Write the two new lines last, once you can see what they have to answer.
6. Decide the drift. Before you write each returning line's new context, ask what you want it to mean this time. Same words, different weight.
7. Close the circle. Build the last stanza around lines 1 and 3 of stanza 1. That's the moment the poem pays off or falls flat.

Lines That Survive Being Said Twice

Most failed pantoums fail at the line level, not the structure level. A line that works beautifully once can turn to nonsense when it's moved. Run each candidate through these tests:

• No opening connectives. "And so," "Because of that," "Which is why" — these fall apart the moment they land at the top of a stanza.
• Light enjambment only. A line that spills hard into the next one becomes a fragment with no floor under it when it's relocated.
• Watch your pronouns. A line whose "she" changes referent between stanzas can be a deliberate, eerie effect — or an accident that confuses the reader. Know which one you're doing.
• Favour concrete nouns. "The gate is rusted off its hinge" bears repeating. "I felt a deep sadness" doesn't.
• Avoid pure setup. Lines that only exist to introduce the next line sound hollow on their second appearance. Every line should be able to be the best line in its stanza.
• Keep the length steady. Lines said aloud twice need a rhythm you can hold. Ten syllables, give or take, is a comfortable default.

Example Lines, Worked Through

Here's a short unrhymed pantoum, four stanzas, closing on the third line of the opening. Read it once for sense, then again to watch the lines change seats.

The kitchen clock has not been right for years.
My mother's recipes still call for rain.
I measure flour with a silver spoon.
The window holds a smaller, darker room.

My mother's recipes still call for rain.
She wrote in pencil, never in a line.
The window holds a smaller, darker room.
The garden gate is rusted off its hinge.

She wrote in pencil, never in a line.
Each page smells faintly of cigarette smoke.
The garden gate is rusted off its hinge.
The nettles keep the marigolds in check.

Each page smells faintly of cigarette smoke.
The kitchen clock has not been right for years.
The nettles keep the marigolds in check.
I measure flour with a silver spoon.

Notice what happens to "The window holds a smaller, darker room." In stanza 1 it's a plain observation about glass. In stanza 2, sitting two lines lower, it sounds like a comment on the handwriting, then on the whole house. The words didn't move much. The reader did.

"My mother's recipes still call for rain" is doing the heaviest work in the poem. "Calls for" is a recipe verb, and "rain" is weather — the phrase shouldn't quite fit, and that small wrongness is what keeps it interesting on the second pass. Look for lines with that kind of double handle: one phrase that can be read two ways without straining.

Three Checks Before You Call It Finished

The cover test. Read every repeated line with a card held over everything above it. Any line that collapses needs revising, not rescuing.

The drift test. List each repeat and write one sentence beside it describing what it now means. If any two entries are identical, that repeat is decoration. Change the surrounding lines or swap the line out.

The ear test. Read the whole thing aloud, slowly. Pantoums develop accidental chants — three lines in a row starting with "The," or a repeated rhyme you didn't plan. Fix the monotony by varying sentence shape in the new lines, not by breaking the repeats.

One more thing: check the ending. The final line should feel both inevitable and slightly altered, like a phrase you've heard all your life and only now understand. If it lands exactly as it did at the top of the page, the circle hasn't closed — it's just been drawn twice.

Start With Six Lines

You don't need a full plan to begin. Write six standalone lines about something that happens to you more than once a week. Choose four for the opening. Let the other two become the new material in stanza 2, and write two fresh lines to complete it. That's a third of a pantoum in twenty minutes.

Then read it back and ask the only question that matters with this form: which line do you want to hear again, and what do you want it to mean the second time? Answer that, and the remaining stanzas mostly write themselves.Photo: Polina ⠀ / Pexels