Verse Craft

Overview

Write, scan, and revise verse: fixed forms such as the limerick, sonnet, haiku, and villanelle; ballads and song lyrics; rhyming picture-book text; and verse that lives inside a story (a character's song, a prophecy, a skipping rhyme). Every claim that a line scans is shown, not asserted: the agent marks the stresses, counts the syllables, and labels the rhyme scheme so the author can check the work. The author's poem is the standard; propose changes, do not rewrite it wholesale.

Prerequisites

None. A standalone poem needs no project: save it where the user asks, as a plain .md file. Verse that belongs to a story needs the story project, story.md (POV, tone, era), and the file of the character who speaks or sings it.

When to Use

• Writing a new poem, limerick, song, or rhyme in a given form
• Checking whether an existing poem scans or keeps its rhyme scheme
• Fixing meter, forced rhymes, or padded lines in a draft poem
• Verse inside a story: a character's song, a riddle, a prophecy, an epigraph the author writes themselves
• Rhyming text for a picture book (plan the spreads with adaptation, write and scan the verse here)
• NOT for unintended rhymes or jingles in prose (use line-editing)
• NOT for permissions when quoting another writer's poem or lyrics (use editorial-review)
• NOT for a poetry collection as a story project: the CLI checks fiction entities, so keep a collection as plain files and do not run story init for it

Hard Rules

• Never say a line scans without showing its stresses (or, in another language's tradition, what that tradition counts). Mark them as in references/meter-and-scansion.md.
• Never pad a line to fill the meter ("did go", "so very", "oh", "all alone and lone"). Rewrite the line instead.
• Never invert natural word order to land a rhyme ("the sea so blue I wade into" for "I wade into the blue sea") unless the author's style already does it on purpose.
• Never reproduce copyrighted lyrics or poems, even a stanza. Allude or write something original in the same form; send permission questions to editorial-review.
• Never rewrite the author's poem wholesale without explicit permission. Propose line-level fixes with a reason each.
• Verse a character writes sounds like that character, not like a competent poet. A clumsy character's poem can be clumsy on purpose; say so rather than fixing it.

Workflow

1. Mode and constraints

1. Work out the mode: write new verse, critique a poem, fix a poem's meter or rhyme, or story verse that sits inside a chapter.
2. Pin the constraints, asking only for what the request leaves open: form, meter, rhyme scheme, line and stanza count, refrain, subject, tone, and any words that must appear. references/forms.md gives each form's rules; state the ones you are following.
3. For story verse, read story.md (era, setting, tone), the speaker's character file (voice notes, voice-words, voice-avoid, education), and the chapter it goes in. Verse must not state canon the project does not already hold: no new names, history, or world rules, and no small facts either (how long something has gone on, what goods come in, who signs for what). Comic verse reaches for these to fill a line or land a rhyme. Before drafting, list the facts the verse may use (names, objects, habits, running jokes the project states) and take every detail from that list.
4. Settle the language. For story verse it is language in story.md (a missing field means en); for a standalone poem, ask if the request leaves it open. Write and scan in that language's own tradition: syllabic (French, Spanish, Italian), quantitative (Classical Greek, Latin, Arabic), mora-based (Japanese), or tonal (Classical Chinese) verse is not measured in English feet. See "Verse in other languages" in references/meter-and-scansion.md and "Rhyme in other languages" in references/rhyme.md. The forms, examples, and forced-rhyme tells in the references are English; adapt them, and say when you cannot scan a tradition reliably.
5. For English, ask which accent the verse is scanned in when it matters (British and American stress differ on words such as address, garage, cigarette), and which dialect the rhymes must work in.

2. Draft

1. Draft for sense first: every line must say something a reader would say in prose. Then fit the meter.
2. Choose rhyme words that carry meaning; build the line toward the rhyme rather than bolting the rhyme on. See references/rhyme.md for forced rhymes and the rhymes readers have seen too often.
3. Keep the syntax natural. Read each line as a sentence: if nobody would say it that way, rewrite it.

3. Scan

Scan every line, including the author's lines in critique mode. Show a scansion table (format in references/meter-and-scansion.md) with the stress pattern, syllable count, and rhyme letter for each line, and mark each departure from the meter as deliberate (a trochee at the line start, a feminine ending) or a fault (a stress that falls on a weak syllable, a missing or extra beat).

When the user asks for the poem only, still scan every line and check the rhyme scheme before answering, then return just the verse and offer the table afterwards. Never return a line whose end word breaks the scheme or whose beat count breaks the form: fix it first.

4. Check rhyme and form

1. Label the rhyme scheme with letters (AABBA). Mark slant rhymes and eye rhymes, and say whether each was meant.
2. Check the form's other rules from references/forms.md: refrains repeated exactly, the volta in a sonnet, the syllable count in a haiku, the punchline in a limerick's last line.
3. Read the poem aloud, or offer the system's text-to-speech (say on macOS; espeak-ng or spd-say on Linux; check with command -v and ask before installing anything). A line that stumbles aloud is a fault even if the table says it scans.

5. Revise

Present fixes in the edit-note format the line-editing skill uses, with the verse line as the location:

**stanza 2, line 3** · rhythm
> Before: And the boat that did come on the Thursday tide
> After: And the boat that came in on the Thursday tide
Why: "did come" pads the line; "came in" keeps four beats without the filler.

Lead with faults that break the form, then weak rhymes, then polish. Apply only what the author accepts, or everything on explicit instruction. Rescan every line you change.

6. Place story verse

1. Put the verse where it is read: in the chapter body, or in a matter/ file for an epigraph, created without a printed page title:

story add matter 'Epigraph' --heading=false

2. Keep line breaks through every build: end each line of a stanza, except the last, with a backslash (\), and leave a blank line between stanzas. For verse set off from the prose, put the stanza in a blockquote and end each quoted line the same way.
3. Record the verse's facts in the usual places: a song that recurs is a motif (theme-craft), a prophecy is a promise (plot-structure).
4. Run maintenance:

story reindex .
story wordcount . --write
story check .

If story is not installed, use the bundled fallback node ../story-maintenance/scripts/story.js with the same arguments. Use node <checkout>/bin/story.js instead only when the user names a Story Skills repository checkout or you are working in one. Write the script as an absolute path (resolve the fallback relative to this skill folder) and run it from the folder you would run story from, so . and other relative paths keep their meaning. Use Node, not Bun or a package script: Bun would load that folder's bunfig.toml (which can run code) and .env, and a package script runs from the checkout's root. If no CLI is available, perform the registry and word-count checks manually.

Reference Files

• references/forms.md - Rules, an original example, and common faults for the limerick, sonnets, haiku, villanelle, ballad, clerihew, couplets, free verse, song lyrics, and rhyming picture-book text
• references/meter-and-scansion.md - Feet and meters, how to find a word's stress, the scansion table format, which departures are allowed, and syllabic, quantitative, mora-based, and tonal traditions in other languages
• references/rhyme.md - Kinds of rhyme, scheme notation, forced-rhyme tells, rhymes readers have seen too often, and rhyme in other languages

Shared Conventions

Every story skill follows the shared conventions in ../story-maintenance/references/conventions.md, resolved relative to this skill folder. Read it before creating, renaming, or linking story files. If that file is missing because this skill was installed without story-maintenance, the essentials are: kebab-case ids and filenames, YAML frontmatter on every story-project file, _index.md registry tables that story reindex rebuilds (never edit them by hand), bidirectional links between entities, characters for who is on the page and mentions for who is only referred to, status: deceased plus died-in: chapter-{NN} for deaths, and no project-local generator or build scripts (run only the installed or bundled Story CLI).