The "Pie de Arte Mayor"

An elevated verse style of 15th century Castille. It was normally an 8- or 12- line verse form that saw use in Spanish and Catalan throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

It was used for everything from lyric poetry to epics, like Juan de Mena's El laberinto de Fortuna, "The Labyrinth of Fortune", 1444).

In my adaptation of this form for Lady Antionette's Iberian persona, I wanted to certainly keep the feet of three syllables (mostly anapests), which help to create the dancing feeling more indicative of Romance languages than the strong preference for alternating stresses of English. Further, I intentionally chose to break my very regular rhyming pattern (another holdover from Spanish, which has far fewer ending sounds than English and tended towards longer repeating rhymes) with the recipient's name, in order to increase the emphasis.