Heroic Couplet
A heroic couplet is a pair of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter, commonly used in English poetry. Each couplet presents a complete thought or idea, making it a concise and impactful form of expression. This structure has been popular in literature for centuries, particularly in epic and narrative poetry, as well as in satirical and didactic works.
4 Key excerpts on "Heroic Couplet"
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 - 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 - ePubShakespeare's Poetic Styles
Verse into Drama
- John Baxter(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The added discipline of the Heroic Couplet offers simultaneously a way of checking and placing the dynamism of individual thought and feeling and of alluding to the social and political consequences of individual action without digressing or disrupting unity. A. P. Rossiter, for one, thinks that the play ‘is seriously flawed by its peculiar dependence on Wood-stock : peculiar because Shakespeare not only took items from it, but also left behind in it explanations badly needed in his play, items taken for granted, or as read, which produce puzzles that cannot be cleared up without reference to the earlier play’. 12 But Rossiter ignores the way in which poetry, and especially the Heroic Couplet, is capable of filling in, by suggestion, enough of the necessary background to make its meaning or its action self-sufficient and intelligible. 13 Before proceeding directly to the play, it is perhaps worth considering why the Heroic Couplet, of its very nature, is the instrument most capable of reconciling diverse and sometimes discordant claims on the attention of the poet. The best explanation is to be found in Yvor Winters’s essay, ‘The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention.’ 14 The Heroic Couplet, all things considered, appears to be the most flexible of forms: it can suggest by discreet imitation, the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable; it can contain all of these effects, if need be, in a single poem. What, then, makes the couplet so flexible? The answer can be given briefly: its seeming inflexibility. That is, the identity of the line is stronger in rhymed verse than in unrhymed, because a bell is rung at the end of every second line; the identity of the line will be stronger in the couplet than in any other stanza because the couplet is the simplest and most obvious form of stanza possible...
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...O. Churchill reckons the following couplet; but by the general usage of the day, the final ed is not made a separate syllable:— "With hic | and hoec, | as Pris | -cian tells, | sacer | -dos was | de_cli | -n~ed_; But now | its gen | -der by | the pope | far bet | -ter is | de_fi | -n~ed_." Churchill's New Grammar, p. 188. MEASURE III.—IAMBIC OF SIX FEET, OR HEXAMETER. Example I.—A Couplet. "S~o v=a | -r~y~ing still | th~eir m=oods, | ~obs=erv | -~ing =yet | ~in =all Their quan | -tities, | their rests, | their cen | -sures met | -rical." MICHAEL DRAYTON: Johnson's Quarto Dict., w. Quantity. Example II.—From a Description of a Stag-Hunt. "And through | the cumb | -rous thicks, | as fear | -fully | he makes, He with | his branch | -ed head | the ten | -der sap | -lings shakes, That sprink | -ling their | moist pearl | do seem | for him | to weep; When aft | -er goes | the cry, | with yell | -ings loud | and deep, That all | the for | -est rings, | and ev | -ery neigh | -bouring place: And there | is not | a hound | but fall | -eth to | the chase." DRAYTON: Three Couplets from twenty-three, in Everett's Versif., p...
