Couplet
A couplet is a pair of consecutive lines of poetry that usually rhyme and have the same meter. In literature, couplets are often used to create a sense of completion or to emphasize a point. They can be found in various forms of poetry, including sonnets and epics, and are known for their concise and impactful nature.
5 Key excerpts on "Couplet"
eBook - ePubThe Prosody Handbook
A Guide to Poetic Form
- Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...13 Stanza forms I. THE Couplet The simplest of English stanzas is the Couplet: Phryne Thy flattering picture, Phryne, is like thee, Only in this, that you both painted be. A poem may consist of a single Couplet, like the Donne epigram above, or of a series of Couplets. An unrhymed stanza of two lines—a rare form in English—is called an unrhymed Couplet or a DISTICH. Iambic tetrameter and pentameter Couplets are by far the most common. Any group of lines that rhyme consecutively rather than alternately, however, are properly described as Couplets. Thus Shelley’s “Music When Soft Voices Die,” consisting of two four-line stanzas, is a Couplet rather than a quatrain poem. The iambic pentameter Couplet, first used by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, has been in continuous use since the fifteenth century. It was the verse form de rigeur in the late seventeenth and throughout most of the eighteenth centuries. All iambic pentameter Couplets, whether “closed” or “open,” are HEROIC CoupletS, though Pope’s preference for the closed Couplet has accustomed us to think of it as the heroic. In an OPEN Couplet (whether it be pentameter, tetrameter, or what not) the syntactical unit carries over into the first line of the next Couplet, and there is no heavy pause at the end of its own second line: The sire then shook the honours of his head, And from his brows damps of oblivion shed Full on the filial dullness. In a CLOSED Couplet the syntactical unit comes to an end at the end of the second line, and there is a heavy pause or a full stop: Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain, And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign. Used in various ways and contexts, Couplets produce various effects: flowing, musical effects in Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”; wit and brilliance in Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”; resonance and incantation in Shelley’s “Music When Soft Voices Die.” The Couplet does, however, easily lend itself to wit and aphorism...
eBook - ePub- Philip Hobsbaum(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 THE HEROIC Couplet The heroic Couplet resembles a blank verse line, inasmuch as the basic metre runs: The difference is that the heroic Couplet rhymes in pairs. The rhyme scheme is notated as a a b b c c d d. Each individual letter betokens a new rhyme. Any coincidence of letters betokens the same rhyme, as follows: When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat; a Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit; a Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay: b Tomorrow’s falser than the former day; b Lies worse, and, while it says, we shall be blest c With some new joys, cuts off what we possessed. c Strange cozenage! None would live past years again d Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; d And, from the dregs of life, think to receive, e What the first sprightly running could not give. e I’m tired with waiting for this chemic gold, f Which fools us young, and beggars us when old. f This is from Aurung-Zebe, by John Dryden (1631–1700), and one may feel surprised to find that it is a play. It is, in fact, a heroic tragedy; one akin to classical epic, whose heroes strike self-consciously noble attitudes. Hence the name of the metre: heroic Couplet. The mode of sententious moralizing, of which this is a fine example, rose in the early seventeenth century and dominated English poetry, throughout that century and its successor. Especially between 1640 and 1750, or thereabouts, it was how one wrote a long poem, dramatic or not. The form of the heroic Couplet was invented by Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400), often, and for other reasons, termed ‘the father of English poetry’. It thus antedates the invention of blank verse by some 150 years. Chaucer’s first exercise in the metre seems to have been his Legend of Good Women, which is usually dated to the mid-1380s...
eBook - ePub- Jeffrey Wainwright(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...What most marks off poetry is the line. In Chapter 2 we saw how the claps in the schoolyard rhyme ‘When Suzi was …’ defined the verse. Each clap is a beat, and the beats are put together in lines. The rhythm created in the line is a sound in the head and the ear, and in written form becomes a defined space on a page. These lines of rhythm have been fundamental to the practice and concept of poetry, both as a mnemonic and a device working on the senses. Once more we must recall poetry’s oral roots. During its speaking, the way that the poem manipulates the time by deployment of pace, length of syllable, and emphasis, or beat, is decisive. These qualities comprise the cadence of the words (see Chapter 2). ‘Cadence’ comes from Latin and Italian words meaning to fall, and this description, as when the wistful Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night says of a song ‘It had a dying fall’ (Act I Sc i, 4), is as often used of verse as of music. Under ‘cadence’, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes George Puttenham writing in 1589 of the fal of a verse in euery last word with a certaine tunable sound which being matched with another like sound, do make a concord. Poetry highlights the element of time, and timing in how the particular sounds of words fall against each other and so compose ‘a concord’, or pleasing harmony of sound. It is in this respect of course that poetry is closest to music and both share such terms as ‘rhythm’ and ‘beat’...
eBook - ePub- Timothy Gura, Benjamin Powell(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Most poets today work from rather than within strict metrical patterns, so that you often find an interesting combination of the two modes within a single poem. The traditional lines establish a certain expectation; when, a few lines later, you find the insertion of free verse, that expectation is denied, and variety and contrast are underscored. Or a strictly regular line may surprise you with its steady beat and help point to a climax. Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Open the Gates” (which we discuss at length later in this chapter) contains an interesting example of this effect. Most poets writing in free verse still seem to be hearing some standard meters, although they ignore these persistent echoes when they wish. Free verse, then, is not simply the gush of emotional language spilling any old way down the page. Robert Frost once remarked that writing what some people called free verse was like playing tennis with the net down. Even such a free spirit as Picasso seemed to agree. He admitted that the cubist movement in modern painting could be called a liberation; then he cautioned, “But what the artist gains in the way of liberty, he loses in the way of order.” It might make more sense to refer to contemporary free verse as “freed” verse. Study a poem carefully to see how freed it is from traditional patterns. Discover and reveal which patterns it continues to employ. Then use this “alternating” freedom and adherence to produce the poem you admire. █ The Stanza In Chapter 9 we learned that a stanza of poetry is roughly comparable to a paragraph, a major unit of thought. As such, it is an important factor in the organization. A stanza may also be a unit of sound, just as a line of poetry is not only a line of print but also a unit of sound, and a word is not only a symbol for meaning but also a combination of sounds as well. The stanzaic structure often contributes significantly to the poem’s pattern of sound...
eBook - ePub- Richard Andrews(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Throughout the poem, there are enjambements to reinforce the prose-like colloquial tone, sometimes punctuated with a comma and sometimes not: “Where can we finde two better hemispheares/Without sharpe North”. And punctuation with question marks, full stops, semicolons and commas, as well as the elisions within and between words (“desir’d”, “t’was”), enable the writing to stand in dynamic relation to its musical properties. Finally, the movement of the language is critical to the sense. In the Couplet, “For love, all love of other sights controules,/And makes one little roome, an every where”, the very first word is a continuation of the argument via the logical connective ‘for’. The metaphysical leap from “one little roome” to “an every where” (the particularization of ‘an’ makes it all other possible worlds, not just a vague ‘everywhere’) is managed within one compact line and leads on to further lines about explorers, maps and “worlds on worlds”. So syntax, working with metre, indicates moves that are articulated (both in the sense of expressed and joined) within each stanza by musical/dance patterning and within each sentence and line (again working in concert). Rhythm in Poetry One could say that poetry is prose with rhythm. But that is not exactly true, as some prose has rhythm. Rather, poetry is language with an ostensibly foregrounded rhythm that is sometimes formalized as metre (including metrical variation). What is the function of rhythm in poetry? Partly, it is to set the words in time: not so much to situate the poem in a chronological or other time frame, but to arrange the constituent parts of the poem in a time relation to each other. In other words, the rhythmic identity of the poem is internal to the poem. Thus rhythm becomes one of the compositional tools available to the poet. As rhythm is about time relations, the silences of the poem are as key as the words themselves...
