Terza Rima

4 Key excerpts on "Terza Rima"

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  The Portable Poetry Workshop

  • Nigel McLoughlin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  The structure of the final stanza can be varied to a single line – for example, d-e-d, e – or a couplet – for exam-ple, d-e-d, e-e. The rhyme scheme has been described as ‘two steps forward, one step back’ giving it a rolling momentum and waltz-like rhythm, with the middle lines as backward glances. The capitolo is a fifteenth-century Italian form that shares the same meter, rhyme and structure as a Terza Rima. It came into being when Terza Rimas became more didactic. By the nineteenth century it evolved to be a term used for light or satirical Terza Rimas. A later variation invented by Edward Lowbury (1913–2007) is the piccola , which restricts lines to six syllables. History Dante Alighieri introduced the Terza Rima in his Divine Comedy (ca. 1308– 1321). It is thought he may have been influenced by sirventès , a lyric form used by the troubadours. Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1343–1400) Complaint to His Lady is the first known example in English. Sir Thomas Wyatt brought the Terza Rima wider attention in the sixteenth century. Poets have continued to use it since, from Milton (1608–1674) to the Romantics and on into the twentieth century and beyond, with poets including Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden and the Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes whose poem Noir we look at later in the chapter. Shelley’s Ode to The West Wind (1819) is made up of five cantos: each of four tercets and a final couplet, they have been described as ‘Terza Rima son-nets’. The Terza Rima rhyme scheme is closest to the Spenserian sonnet with 12 Martin Figura its interlocking rhyme scheme and conclusive final couplet. Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night is a later example of this variation.

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  Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form

  • Philip Hobsbaum(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8

  VERSE FORMS (I)

  This chapter will seek to define some of the principal verse forms in English involving line groups of three or more.

  Terza Rima was invented by the Italian poet Dante for his vast work La Divina Commedia . It consists of three-line sections, interlinking one with another. The first and third lines of each section rhyme, and the second line rhymes with the first and third lines of the next section, thus: a b a b c b c d c d e d e f e. Any series of three-line sections, also known as tercets, may be brought to a conclusion by a single line rhyming with the second line of the three-line section immediately preceding. Dante wrote his sections in eleven-syllable lines, also termed hendecasyllabics.

  In English, Terza Rima has been more discussed than practised. Chaucer introduced it in a minor poem, ‘Complaint to his Lady’. However, a more influential exponent of this particular form was Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42). He was a contemporary and friend of the inventor of blank verse, the Earl of Surrey and, like him, was a close student of the Italians. Wyatt employed Terza Rima in his three satires, mostly complaining of life at court. The first is in the shape of a letter addressed to his friend, Sir John Poins (or Poyntz). The metre is technically five-stress, but it is very much variegated into sprung rhythm:

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  A Companion to Anticlassicisms in the Cinquecento

  • Marc Föcking, Susanne A. Friede, Florian Mehltretter, Angela Oster(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  5

  3.2.1.1  Forms and Practices of Terza Rima Writing

  The terzina, which probably has its origins in the serventese, was coined by Dante as an epic stanza, but was not defined terminologically until some time after him (Vecchi Galli 2008 , 44), initially primarily by the term terzetti. In the sixteenth century, the terzina was also used as a metrical form for the elegy and the eclogue.

  Large-scale encyclopaedic poems with an allegorical component were one of the main fields of application of the Terza Rima, and in this genre a line of tradition continues from Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione and Petrarch’s Trionfi into the Cinquecento. Important texts in the Trecento are Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo and Federico Frezzi’s Quadriregio, in the Quattrocento Matteo Palmieri’s Città di vita, and finally in the first half of the Cinquecento Giovanni Filoteo Achillini’s 100-canto didactic poem Il Fedele.

  An important metrical exception among these didactic poems is L’Acerba by Cecco d’Ascoli, which was written in the Trecento: Cecco openly deviates from Dante’s model by, among other things, undermining the rhyming pattern used by Dante, combining as he does two tercets into six verses, which involves superimposing a twofold structure on Dante’s tripartite system (Ferrilli 2016 ).

  Another important field of application of the Terza Rima was within narrative historiography. One of the most influential historiographical terzina poems is probably Antonio Pucci’s Centiloquio from the late Trecento. Equally significant within this tradition are Niccolò Machiavelli’s Decennali dating from the beginning of the Cinquecento. Even though this type of Terza Rima poetry does have a connection to the Commedia and the Trionfi, in that the latter repeatedly integrate historical elements, a considerable distance exists between true historiographical texts and the narrative poems written by Dante and Petrarch: while in the Commedia and the Trionfi, the historical elements are woven into the overall allegorical (or, from a modern point of view, even fictional) text, the historical narrative is clearly the dominant level of content in works such as the Centiloquio or the Decennali

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  Diana's Hunt (Caccia di Diana)

  Boccaccio's First Fiction

  • Anthony K. Cassell, Victoria Kirkham, Anthony K. Cassell, Victoria Kirkham(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  4 The codicological group transmits the poem with two other works by Boccac-cio in Terza Rima. Weightiest of the three is the Amorosa visione, an allegory fifty cantos long amusingly conceived as half of a Divine Comedy 5 and constructed in a gigantic acrostic on the letters of the words that form three prefatory sonetti caudati (that is, tailed or extended sonnets). The shortest work is a ternario with seventy verses, which begins Contento quasi ne' pensier d'amore (Content—almost—in thoughts of love) and has appended a ballad of forty-five verses, Amor, dolce signore (Love, 0 sweet Lord). Since the Visione and ternario-ballata both also catalog ladies to praise them, all three compositions conform as types to the sirventese as Dante shaped it. Branca has suggested that the manuscript tradition probably preserves an editorial decision made by Boccaccio himself, who wished to anthologize three related pieces in Terza Rima. 6 This conjecture is consistent with what we otherwise know about the author's fondness for numerological games. Numerology is more preva-lent in the poetics of his Italian fiction than in his Latin works, and generally speaking, the earlier the writing, the more conspicuous the number play. 7 Numerology A head and verse count in the Hunt marks arithmetic coordinates confirm-ing that the text is a numerical composition and that it has come down to us intact. Those ladies w h o m Diana's messenger thrice summons in Canto 1 are exactly thirty-three. Since the Mystery Lady is last on the list, she is, mirabile dictu, the thirty-third—a position, of course, calqued directly on the numerology of the sweet new style. In the sixth chapter of the Vita nuova, telling of his epistolary sirventese for sixty Florentine women, Dante says he mentions that poem only because the name Beatrice, 24 § Poetic Structure marvelously, would not suffer any other place there but the ninth.

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