Couplets are any two lines being employed as one, whether or not they comprise just one stanza or are members of a bigger stanza. Most couplets rhyme (aa), but they don’t have to. There are many set types of the couplet and an array of variations according to line length and meter. The following rhyme “aa”:
- Short Couplet- iambic or trochaic tetrameter. From Maxine Kumin’s “Morning Go swimming”
Into my empty mind there come
a cotton beach, a pier wherefrom
I put down, oily and nude
through mist in oily solitude.
The weighty seas are rowled in the deeps
In mighty heaps,
And in the rocks’ foundations do arise
To hug the skies.
Wave after wave in hillsides one another crowds,
As though the deeps resolved to storm the clouds.
How You Can That you can do just about anything having a couplet. They are able to stand as single ideas, meaning they are able to exist by themselves, outdoors from the poem, or they may be enjambed, counting on the prior and succeeding couplets to become complete. Most open form couplets are written by doing this, along with a rhyme plan should play no effect on how couplets are or aren’t interlocked.
The couplet could be a very lonely stanza, minimalistic.
Poems whose submissions are melancholy or depressing, for instance, could make good utilisation of the couplet because–around the page–there’s lots of white-colored space, avoid, instead of writing in quatrains in which the stanzas are blocks which limit the white-colored space. Too, since the couplet is really so small, it may be beneficial to bring along it filled with image and emotion, just like a hard punch packed inside a tight space, very concentrated. When the power inside a couplet isn’t contained towards the couplet, then you’ve a quatrain or something like that bigger. This does not mean the concept and emotion cannot flow between or through couplets, I’m only suggesting that every couplet be considered a effective, emotionally-intensive unit towards the whole. — Damon McLaughlin
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Last Updated 8/23/99