Footprints in the Sand

I look for footprints in the sand –

No Man Friday is welcome here –

My feet only must mark this land,

Human contact is what I fear.

*

No Man Friday is welcome here,

To bring disease or spread ill will.

Human contact is what I fear;

Of base desires I have my fill.

*

To bring disease or spread ill will,

I must protect against such thought

Of base desires. I have my fill

Of fighting such infections caught.

*

I must protect against my thought:

Thought weakens my resolve to stave

Off fighting such infections caught

Lingering in my small enclave.

*

Thought weakens my resolve to stave

This quest for others of my race;

Lingering in my small enclave,

Emotions I cannot embrace.

*

This quest for others of my race,

Seeking clues that others exist;

Emotions I cannot embrace

Prompt me to want to desist.

*

Seeking clues that others exist –

My feet only do mark this land,

Prompting my eyes to now desist –

I find no footprints in the sand.

Rules for the pantoum

1) It has no specified line length, but each stanza must have four lines.

2) The basic rhyme scheme is abab.

3) The second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third lines respectively of the second stanza. This pattern is repeated until the last stanza, in which the original a lines becomes the b lines.

Thus, the rhyme scheme for a 4 stanza pantoum is abab bcbc cdcd dada, whilst for a 5 stanza pantoum it would be abab bcbc cdcd dede eaea.

Notes on the pantoum

You need a theme to provide continuity throughout the poem and a good choice of end-words that allow for different meanings and contexts; for example, the word ‘shore’ at the end of line 1 is used as a noun but at the end of line 8 it does duty as a verb, whilst the word ‘grave’ at the end of line 6 is used as a noun but at the end of line 29 it is used as an adjective.

This is an easy poem to write in that half of it is line repetition: whole lines are repeated, from one stanza to the next, thus the second line in stanza one, ‘No Man Friday is welcome here –’, is used as the first line in stanza two. But, conversely, this is also a challenging poem to write, knowing that every line you write is going to be reused and (hopefully) make sense.

There is some variation in the reuse of lines. In the 3rd stanza, ‘I must protect against such thought / Of base desires’, there is an enjambment (running on of lines). This phrase becomes ‘I must protect against my thought’ in the 4th stanza. This is allowed by the rules. Similarly, in the 6th stanza, ‘Prompt me to want to desist’ becomes ‘Prompting my eyes to now desist’ in the final stanza – not the same number of syllables but a better fit to the flow of the stanza.

It’s important to note that you’re not confined by any rigidity of form. In A Creative Writing Handbook*, the author notes,

“Traditionally, the pantoum has only eight syllables in a line, but you can vary this. No one says that you can’t break loose from the pantoum: when you are working with a form, and it starts working against what you want to write, adapt the form or ditch it. You could […] avoid using rhyme and simply work with the repetition of the lines […] you could also make the repeated lines similar to, rather than replicas of, the original lines.”

My reflections on the poem

It’s important to start with a strong first line for it can set the theme of the story that you’re telling (if there is one!). With my pantoum, I managed to resolve the poem with a satisfactory conclusion, rewording the last line to make it answer a question indirectly posed by the first line.

As for the subject of the poem itself, it is apt considering the current worldwide Covid-19 crisis even though the poem was written in 2017. The narrator seems to be a Robinson Crusoe figure who finds himself alone on a desert island. Of course, the desert island might be metaphorical rather than literal: that the narrator is seeking to cut himself off from others.

There is mental conflict going on revealed by the choice of words – ‘fear’, ‘disease’, ‘infections’ – that prompts the narrator to choose isolation rather than welcome human contact – ‘No Man Friday is welcome here’. Humans are associated with things to be feared.

The narrator also realises that human contact provokes more than a physical distress as it raises other issues – ‘Emotions I cannot embrace’. This culminates, in the concluding stanza, with the desire to no longer search for evidence of humans, along the lines of “what I can’t see … doesn’t exist”, and essentially erasing the inner conflict.

An observation taken from A Creative Writing Handbook*, also confirms my own experience in writing this pantoum.

“The pantoum […] suits subjects such as obsession, searching and finding, comparing the present with the past. If you use rhyme, you will find that the pantoum finishes emphatically, and that it is more likely to make a decisive statement to resolve any conundrum you may have set yourself and the reader.”

My experience is that the conundrum faced by my narrator was introduced unconsciously and dictated by the form itself.

* Bill Greenwell (2009) Poetry: The Freedom of Form, A & C Black Publishers Ltd. in association with The Open University.