One of the poems on the page of some of my personal favorites is Rudyard Kipling's Ballad of the Clampherdown. (A singer named Leslie Fish has set that to music, incidentally) When the Poetry Revel topic was "Curses" I knew right away that I had to write a poem about an ex-Shaman who sold out subpath secrets to the Spies. I was tired of my usual four-line verses and simple meter, so I lifted the meter and rhyme patterns from "Clampherdown".

I suppose I did something right, since I won second place for it. I put quite a lot of work into this one. The ABCCB rhyme scheme was not easy to work with, at least for someone with my simplistic tastes in poetry, but I think the results were worth it.

This poem is another of my ballads, the sort of thing that would be the oral tradition of a non-literate people. Like its real-world equivalents, it employs repetition, meter, and rhyme to both make it easier for the storyteller to memorize and recall, and to draw the listeners along with it as it is recited. The theme of the disgraced ex-Shaman's lost name ties the poem together, and ties the first verse to the last to wrap up the poem between them.