Listen to Juan Morales Ramos, Moralito, sing the lines below from his décima "Allá en la Altura" (480 kb wav.) [Up In The Highlands] read the literal translation immediately below and follow the explanation of it's structure at right..

Literal translation
From "Up in the Highlands" by Moralito

For a stove I use a fireplace
Which I stoke with kindling,
Since my house is small
I have no television.
In my narrow room
I live as well as lawyer does.
Mister, I can hear on my tin roof
the sounds of pigeons.
and I live up there on the hill
better off than a rich man.
 

A Decima in English
Written for the Cuatro Project by the poet,
Ina Cumpiano

Play me a décima, friend.
Play me a son from the island.
Play me the sea and the sand…
When cuatro and sunlight blend
I’m a sick man on the mend.
Where, in the tree branch, coquí
Sings his two notes in high C,
There where the sun’s a bright mango
And a plena more real than a tango,
Play, borinqueño, for me.
 

Click here for another décima: a decima about two trees that come together to make a cuatro

Distinctive forms of the décima exist all over Latin America. The Puerto Rican décima is a poem of ten-line verses composed of rhymed octosyllabic lines, which descends from medieval Spanish ballads. The aguinaldo, it's smaller cousin and the décima are often sung extempore. The singer of décimas and aguinaldos sings of love, of the human condition, of the beauty of the Puerto Rican countryside, of persons the singer wants to honor, of impressive events, and of holiday cheer.

Vicente Martínez de Espinel, (1551? - 1624)  Spanish poet, novelist and musician from Ronda, Andalucía, Spain, is recognized as the one who revived the poetic form, which is also known today as the espinela, and who gave it its modern form.

The Puerto Rican jíbaro singer/poet tradition can be traced back to Espinel, and to medieval Spanish and Moorish roots. A jíbaro traditional singer is expected to sing the many traditional forms both passionately as well as accurately. The décima, when sung in Puerto Rico, is invariably sung to the tune of a slow seis---the music which has been fused with the décima and which is traditionally played with a cuatro, guitar and güiro, or scratch gourd.

Listen to the many varieties of the seis here.

Decima Structure:
While composing or improvising a décima, the trovador must keep all the following rules in mind. Not a simple task while making it up on the spot!

1-Rhyme: The ten lines in the traditional décima must rhyme in the following pattern (from the example at left):

2- Syllable Count: The number of syllables in each line must add up to 8.  But what a syllable actually consists of and how the count is made is determined by a set of specific rules:

• When a verse or line ends in a word with its emphasized syllable being the one before the last, or penultumate (a palabra llana, or "level" word) then the total number of syllables in that line must add up to 8 (Note the second line of the example)

• When a verse or line ends in a word with its emphasized syllable being the last (a palabra aguda, or pointed word) then 1 is added to the total count. (Note the first line of the example)

• When the verse or line ends in a word with its emphasized syllable being the antepenultimate one (a palabra esdrújula, or taccented hird from the end) then 1 is subtracted from the total count.

• When there is a word in a verse that ends in a vowel, followed immediately by another word that begins with a vowel, the two adjacent syllables are counted as one (this is called a sinalefa or "elision")

• When a "weak" vowel (i,  u) is joined with a "strong" vowel (a, o, e) within a word and the emphasis falls on the weak vowel, an accent mark is placed over the weak vowel. This creates what is known as a "hiatus" for the purposes of syllabification, and the union is broken into two separately counted syllables.

The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project wishes to thank Miguel González, "El Pico de Oro" of Springfield, Massachusetts, for making these rules available to us.

Further resources on Spanish poetic versification here and here