Note bene: The following document may strike you as a bit mysterious if you haven't read the reasoning behind it. Most importantly, I'm not necessarily advocating that all of the formal properties herein should be preserved, nor that Marot intended them all.
Also, the following document will be essentially entirely meaningless to you if you've not read Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
=-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= SEVERAL SPECIES OF SMALL FORMAL PROPERTIES OF MAROT'S "A UNE DAMOYSELLE MALADE" GATHERED INTO POETICAL FORM The piece's a poem. It's got a title, "A Une Damoyselle Malade" and that title doesn't appear in the poem. In each line the final syllable's accented and each line's got just three syllables. The starting line has got some alliteration and the first and last lines are exactly the same. The poem's meter occurs naturally when read as prose and it's perfectly grammatical when read that way. The lines rhyme in the pattern AA, BB, CC, ..., MM, AA and no rhyme's repeated save the first and the last. All those sounds that rhyme are spelled identically and the first line's acronym refers to the rhyme scheme. "A Une Damoyselle Malade" has as many lines as this poem and "A Une Damoyselle Malade" has one-quarter the words. Marot's poem is composed in French that's 500 years old and its meaning is in couplets out of phase with the rhymes. All its odd numbered lines have punctuation at the end but no even numbered lines save the last end with any. There's five trisyllabic words sitting alone on lines and almost no internal punctuation, nose and jazz. There're four couplets with bisyllabic rhymes but there're twelve bisyllabic rhyming words. Four letters go unused (including 'w' and 'y') yet only pronouns and articles are ever repeated. The poet's own name appears midway through the poem where it changes from respectful to familiar, too. It's light in tone. =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-= =-=-=-=The Secret Scoop on "Several Species":
In every couplet, one of the two properties applies to "Several species" itself. Some of these require a little flexibility of thought, such as the lines that explicity name "A Une Damoyselle Malade", which already "apply" to SS without any remapping.
Properties that require extreme bending and other properties:
Notes on form:
For reference, here is one of the very first drafts.
PS: Let's see ya translate that.