Couplets
A couplet consists of two lines of verse that often rhyme at the end. These pairs can be categorized as closed couplets, which express a complete thought and stand independently, or open couplets, where the meaning flows from the first line to the second without a pause. Traditionally, couplets are used within longer poems to shape structure or conclude sections, although they can also exist as complete poems. The heroic couplet, characterized by two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter, has been a prominent form in English poetry since its early use by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century. This form reached its peak in the 17th and 18th centuries with poets like John Dryden and Alexander Pope, who mastered the metrical richness and rhetorical depth of couplets. Though the rise of free verse in modern poetry led to a decline in the popularity of rhymed verse, many influential poets, such as Robert Frost and W. B. Yeats, have continued to explore couplets in their work. Today, couplets remain a respected poetic form, illustrating their adaptability and enduring appeal in various styles and themes.
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Couplets
A couplet is a pair of lines of verse that are often end rhymed. If the pair of rhymed lines form a complete thought and are able to stand on their own apart from the rest of the poem, they are called a closed couplet. If, however, the meaning of the first line runs over to the second line without punctuation (also called enjambment), and the meaning of the two lines cannot stand independent of the surrounding poem, they are called an open couplet.
Couplets are most commonly used as units within longer poems either to shape the structure of the poem or to close a speech or a sonnet. More rarely, a single couplet may form a complete poem. The heroic couplet, two end-rhymed lines of iambic pentameter with a caesura (pause), is the most common couplet in English. Although the origin of the heroic couplet is unknown, Geoffrey Chaucer used it extensively in his fourteenth-century poetry. It reached the height of popularity and artistry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and poets have continued to use it into the twenty-first century where it has also been utilized experimentally in novels.
Brief History
The couplet can be traced to the lyric poets of ancient Greece. It was later adopted by the ancient Romans, most notably Catullus in his love poetry, and later Ovid in his Metamorphoses (ca. 8 CE; English translation, 1480).
Chaucer first used rhyming open couplets in iambic pentameter in The Legend of Good Women, written in the 1380s, as well as in the General Prologue and within most of the tales of The Canterbury Tales. Sixteenth-century literary critics George Puttenham and George Gascoigne used the term “riding rhyme” to describe Chaucer’s use of open couplets and to distinguish them from the heroic couplet as it was evolving in sixteenth-century England, where poets displayed a decided preference for the self-contained, closed couplet despite Christopher Marlowe’s skillful use of the open couplet, beginning with Hero and Leander (1593). The heroic couplet, as it was passed on to two of its most notable practitioners, John Dryden in the late seventeenth century and Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century, was a closed couplet.
A popular poet and literary critic of the late seventeenth century, Dryden is credited with standardizing the heroic couplet, which he used throughout several genres, including witticisms, satires, religious writing, drama, and fables and used as a political instrument. His successor, Alexander Pope, used it as a social instrument. The heroic couplet reaches its zenith in English poetry in the hands of Pope, who utilized couplets in rhythmic variation, parallelism, and balanced form and sense that ranged from the merely comic to high moral seriousness. He proved himself a master of the metrical, syntactical, and rhetorical possibilities of the closed heroic couplet, also making him one of the most quoted of English poets.
By 1790, the dominance of the heroic couplet was ending. The romantics were more interested in freer, experimental forms, although Lord Byron, whose admiration of Pope was unwavering, used the heroic couplet in his first major work, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which was inspired by Pope’s The Dunciad (1728–43). John Keats’s first long poem Endymion (1818) was written in open couplets. Among the Victorians, Robert Browning’s use is the most notable, particularly in “My Last Duchess” (1842), one of his most famous dramatic monologues. It should be noted that Browning’s adept use of enjambment makes his couplets quite different from those of Pope and his followers.
Topic Today
The popularity of free verse that accompanied modernism led to a general devaluation of rhymed verse. Nevertheless, many respected poets have continued to write poems in couplets. W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) used three stanzas of heroic couplets in “Adam’s Curse.” In the title poem from The Man against the Sky (1916), Edwin Arlington Robinson uses couplets in lines with varying meter to reflect the uncertain spiritual and physical movement of the man in the poem. Robert Frost (1874–1963) used couplets of various kinds in a number of poems. “The Tuft of Flowers” from his first collection A Boy’s Will (1913), is written in heroic couplets, with a majority of end-stopped lines that give the poem simplicity and heighten its feeling of tranquility.
Later in the twentieth century, Robert Lowell’s choice of open heroic couplets in “Katherine’s Dream” from his first major collection, Lord Weary’s Castle (1944), led to criticism that he was too attached to the pentameter line. Maxine Kumin was more successful in her use of tetrameter couplets with long vowel end rhymes that capture the sensuous movement of the body in water in “Morning Swim,” a poem from her 1973 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Up Country. Late in the twentieth century, Thom Gunn (1929–2004) used rhyming couplets for three of his poems about AIDS from The Man with Night Sweats (1992). In “Lament,” written for a friend who died in 1984, Gunn demonstrated the ability of the heroic couplet to serve as a vehicle for a single thought: “And so you slept, and died, your skin gone grey, / Achieving your completeness, in a way.”
Bibliography
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