My wife and I recently dined here along the Mississippi at Hastings, Minnesota, at the American Legion. It was a little chilly that night, so nobody was out on deck. But I still snapped this shot of the view. The bridge is only about 1 year old, having replaced the old one. In the distance is the Lock and Dam. Hastings is a city near the confluence of the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers. The area around Hastings was first settled by a military detachment sent from Fort Snelling to guard a blocked shipment of supplies in the winter of 1820. The name "Hastings" was drawn out of a hat from suggestions placed in it by several of the original founders. In 1895 a spiral bridge was built over the Mississippi River, designed to slow down horse-drawn traffic as it entered downtown. The novel design became a tourist attraction, but the bridge was demolished in 1951 because it could not handle modern vehicles. In 1930, the Army Corps of Engineers completed Lock and Dam No. 2 at Hastings.

This poem is a Rondeau Redouble
Rondeau Redouble is a poem with a very complex fixed format. It is written on two rhymes (the a and b rhymes), but in five stanzas of four lines each and one of five lines that repeats a portion of the first line of the poem. Each of the first four lines (which due to the a and b rhymes will be identified in the following stanzas as A1, B1, A2 and B2) get individually repeated in turn once in the following stanzas by becoming successively the respective fourth lines of stanzas 2, 3, 4, and 5; and the first part of the first line is repeated as a short fifth line to conclude the sixth stanza. The stanzas each carry an abab rhyme scheme. So with the repeat line shown in numbered capitals, this can be represented as:

A1,B1,A2,B2 - b,a,b,A1 - a,b,a,B1 - b,a,b,A2 - a,b,a,B2 - b,a,b,a,(A1).

This photograph was taken by the author himself on October 1, 2015.
This poem can have any meter. But Iambic tetramer or pentameter are the most popular.

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