Rhyme royal

Most of books IX and X of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright are written in a stanza-form called 'rhyme royal'. Why?

A rhyme royal stanza rhymes ababbcc, and most poetry using the form arrives in five-beat lines. (There are exceptions, but they tend to be fringe experiments.)

Eleven paces long and seven broad, [A
such space the sacrificial ledge here formed; [B
the pit an ell-span square by tooling sawed [A
in edge of lip; where ancient blood had warmed [B
the stone, old stains it bore; here ghosts had swarmed, [B
here long before had forerunners let fall [C
their offerings’ gore, departed ones to call. [C

Geoffrey Chaucer probably invented rhyme royal, working from French and (especially) Italian models. The stanza enjoyed a long heyday in the fifteenth century, and lingering success in the sixteenth: Thomas Wyatt's 'They flee from me that sometime did me seek' uses the same rhyme scheme, and Shakespeare wrote one poem in rhyme royal. Since then it has appeared less often, and often with antiquarian associations, as in something like Thom Gunn's Merlin in the Cave.

The rhyme royal stanza stands out among successful English stanza-patterns for its imbalance: it has seven lines and one more b-rhyme than the mind feels it ought. That third b-rhyme comes just as the stanza switches from alternating rhyme (abab) to abutting rhyme (bbcc). I had several reasons to choose it for all of the time that Kin-Bright and Qwerthart spend visiting one of the stations of the Star Encaged, but one reason was to make things feel both enriched and off-balance; as one listener commented after the live premiere, the rhyme scheme makes the stanza feel like you are intermittently missing a step on the stairs.

I also chose the form for its associations. In its glory days, rhyme royal was used for many things, but if it has ties to any one particular loose cluster of topics and modes, it brings to mind dreams and visions like Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, the Kingis Quair of James I of Scotland, John Skelton's Bowge of Court, and the anonymous Assembly of Ladies. And it is as a visionary experience that the main parts of these two books are to be taken.