Couplet, a pair of end-rhymed lines of verse that are self-contained in grammatical structure and meaning. A couplet may be formal (or closed), in which case each of the two lines is end-stopped, or it may be run-on (or open), with the meaning of the first line continuing to the second (this is called enjambment). Couplets are most frequently used as units of composition in long poems, but, since they lend themselves to pithy, epigrammatic statements, they are often composed as independent poems or function as parts of other verse forms, such as the Shakespearean sonnet, which is concluded with a couplet. In French narrative and dramatic poetry, the rhyming alexandrine (12-syllable line) is the dominant couplet form, and German and Dutch verse of the 17th and 18th centuries reflects the influence of the alexandrine couplet. The term couplet is also commonly substituted for stanza in French versification. A “square” couplet, for example, is a stanza of eight lines, with each line composed of eight syllables. The preeminent English couplet is the heroic couplet, or two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter with a caesura (pause), usually medial, in each line. Introduced by Chaucer in the 14th century, the heroic couplet was perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. An example is
Then share thy pain, allow that sad relief;
Ah, more than share it, give me all thy grief.
Couplets were also frequently introduced into the blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for heightened dramatic emphasis at the conclusion of a long speech or in running dialogue, as in the following example:
Think what you will, we seize into our hands
His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
ballad: Technique and form…the first consists of a couplet of lines each with four stressed syllables, and with an interwoven refrain:…
End stop, in prosody, a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse, as in these lines from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism:…
Enjambment, in prosody, the continuation of the sense of a phrase beyond the end of a line of verse. T.S. Eliot used enjambment in the opening lines of his poem The Waste Land:…
Alexandrine, verse form that is the leading measure in French poetry. It consists of a line of 12 syllables with major stresses on the 6th syllable (which precedes the medial caesura [pause]) and on the last syllable, and one secondary accent in each half line. Because six syllables is a…
Heroic couplet, a couplet of rhyming iambic pentameters often forming a distinct rhetorical as well as metrical unit. The origin of the form in English poetry is unknown, but Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century was the first to make extensive use of it. The heroic couplet became the principal…
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- structure of ballad