Terza rima

Terza rima is a rhyme scheme that uses an interlocking pattern of rhymed three-line stanzas. The end-word in the middle line supplies the rhyme for the first and third lines of the next stanza. Thus, the rhyme scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe) continues through the end of the poem. Terza rima is most famously associated with the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who used it in his epic poem, The Divine Comedy (La divina commedia, ca. 1320); although scholars are divided as to whether Dante invented the rhyme scheme or adapted it from an earlier form. Poets writing in English from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer to the twenty-first century have used terza rima in their poems, and others have used it for translations of The Divine Comedy in part or whole. Typically, the terza rima line is iambic; in English, the iambic pentameter line dominates, although variations have been used. Because rhyming in English is more difficult than rhyming in Italian, rhymes in English are often near or slant rhymes. More rarely have poets attempted a kind of free verse form of the rhyme scheme.

Brief History

Some scholars think Dante’s terza rima may have been adapted from the troubadours, who used a form, the sirvente, which was characterized by an abacdde pattern of rhyme, with the next verse repeating the pattern. Others see the influence of the sestina, another form created by the troubadours, which consists of six six-line stanzas followed by a three-line envoi. The end-words of the first stanza are repeated through the remaining stanzas, and the envoi incorporates all the line-ending words. Although terza rima uses the triadic structure of the sirvente and the interweaving of both the sirvente and the sestina, only terza rima possesses the theoretical potential to go on endlessly, thus requiring the poet to end the poem arbitrarily. Dante ends each of the three cantiche (religious or narrative poems) of The Divine Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with a single line that rhymes with the end-word of the second line of the preceding tercet. The final word in each cantica (singular of cantiche) is stelle (stars).

Following Dante, both Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Petrarch (1304–1374) wrote several poems employing terza rima, as did several other Italian poets. It became particularly popular as the form for allegorical and didactic poems, although the difficulty of the interlocking rhyme kept it from being widely adopted after the fourteenth century. French poets first used the form in the sixteenth century, with Jean Lemaire de Belges (ca. 1473–1525) claiming to have introduced the form in France in 1503. Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) and the Symbolist poets revived the form in the nineteenth century.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s limited use of terza rima in “A Complaint to His Lady” (ca. 1368) marked its first use by an English poet. It proved more popular in the sixteenth century when Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) used it in three satires, most notably in “Mine Own John Poynz” and in his paraphrases of the Penitential Psalms. Philip Sidney (1554–86); Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47); and the lesser-known Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) also wrote poems in terza rima. The romantic poets experimented with terza rima as well. Lord Byron (1788–1824) translated the fifth canto of the Inferno and also used the rhyme scheme for his Prophecy of Dante, in which Dante reviews Italian history, while Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) used it in “Ode to the West Wind,” a series of five sonnets. In the nineteenth century, Robert Browning’s (1812–89) “The Statue and the Bust,” written in terza rima, has been called one of his best narratives. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1806–61) Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is written in a modified terza rima, and Thomas Hardy’s (1840–1928) “Friends Beyond” uses an original adaptation of the form with tercets of octameter-trimeter-octameter.

Terza Rima Today

Poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have modified terza rima in a variety of ways. Archibald MacLeish’s (1892–1982) lengthy poem Conquistador, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1932, uses a line from the Inferno in its dedication and chooses terza rima heavy with half-rhymes as the form. Other notable uses of terza rima include Robert Frost’s (1874–1963) sonnet “Acquainted with the Night,” which with its tercets and mostly regular pentameter lines is more clearly Dantean terza rima than most modern examples; William Carlos Williams’s (1883–1963) much-anthologized “The Yachts,” which uses terza rima and takes inspiration from a scene from the Inferno; Adrienne Rich’s (1929–2012) “Terza Rima,” which uses half-rhymes, rearranged rhymes, and stretched or shortened meters; and Richard Wilbur’s (1921–2017) “First Snow in Alsace,” which uses strict terza rima in its eight tercets and concluding line. Wilbur used the form again more than six decades later in a startling seven-line poem, “Terza Rima,” published in the New Yorker in 2008.

Countless writers have also chosen to translate Dante into English. While many have used prose, blank verse, or blank tercets (three-line stanzas), some have used terza rima. Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), whose copious notes have added value to her translation (1949–1962), was faithful to the terza rima form in her translation, to mixed critical response. John Ciardi (1916–1986) produced another popular translation (1954–1970) in terza rima; his effort has been praised for its musicality but faulted for the liberties he takes with the original. Several other contemporary translations of the Inferno also use terza rima, including American poet Robert Pinsky’s 1995 version, Irish poet Ciaran Carson’s 2002 version, and creator of the Dante’s Afterlife website J. Simon Harris's 2022 version. Pinsky solves the problem of rhyming in English by relying on consonantal or slant rhyme. Carson stays true to the tercet form, and his rhymes range from true rhymes to slant rhymes and assonance.

Bibliography

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"Terza Rima." Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/glossary/terza-rima. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.