Tutorial: The Couplet.
Like all chains, this one starts off very simply, with a couplet. The couplet is in some ways the simplest form of poetry, and, as a consequence, has become very difficult to do without coming off as hackneyed or cliched. Any poetic form that can be written by first graders unfortunately tends to be dismissed by our society. This is unfortunate, as the couplet can truly be a powerful poetic tool.
At its heart, the couplet is two lines of rhymed poetry. That's it; full stop. The lines can be of any length, and any internal stress pattern. Even two rhyming words, stacked atop each other, can be considered a couplet -- all by themselves. What this means is that pretty much every simple rhyme you can think of has already been beaten to death by enthusiastic elementary school poets and high school boys trying to score points with the current squeeze. However, this doesn't mean that it's not worth trying to do right.
Recommendations for the couplet: unless your central image is absolutely dazzling, don't rhyme 'love' with 'dove', 'far' with 'star', 'heart' with either 'part' or 'apart', or 'eye' with 'die', 'sky' or 'lie'. It's been done before, and probably done better than either you or I would be able to achieve. (There is always the exception to this, the one poem that uses the most cliched of rhymes in a brilliant and new way...but I find that counting on brilliance gets old, and eventually causes even the best poets to get tired and walk away.)
In a lover's chain, the couplet is your poetic foundation. What sort of courtship are you trying to conduct here? Sly, beguiling, shy or abrupt? Whatever your tone is going to be, you create it with you couplet.
I decided that I wanted our courtship to invoke shyness, but to show at the same time that we were going to be approaching from a feminine perspective -- the woman starting the chain, for once. The first line of our couplet reflects this:
Love and roses both are flowers;
This is a fairly feminine line, and even echoes our compliment without directly quoting it. Now, why would a woman be starting a lover's chain? Because life is short, of course, and love is even shorter -- a woman would court openly because there wasn't time to do anything else. Hence my second line:
Both bloom bright, yet die by hours.
The assembled couplet is: Love and roses both are flowers; Both bloom bright, yet die by hours.
This puts forth the impression that I wanted us to create, while avoiding more common rhymes. Since both 'flowers' and 'hours' can be pronounced with either one or two syllables, depending on the region, I was able to keep the rhyme scheme smooth by using these words to echo one another.
Sweet, shy, playful and wistful all at once -- having taken this approach in two steps now, we'll need to maintain it in the entries to come.