Explore the Craft of Writing Poetry French Verse The Fatras, fatrasie, fratrasie, resverie, could be described as the ravings of a happy lunatic. The verse is joyously irrational with no clear direction and yet it has a unique defined structure. Originating in Europe in the Middle Ages it is upbeat, "full of wordplay, ridiculous associations, and intentional nonsense." NPEOPP.
The elements of the Fatras are:
a poem in 11 lines.
composed in a way that the 1st and last lines form a distich, a poem in 2 lines, that holds the entire theme of the larger poem. This is known as the fa