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The rhyming couplet entered English verse in the early Middle English period through the imitation of medieval Latin and Old French models. [3] The earliest surviving examples are a metrical paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer in short-line couplets, and the Poema Morale in septenary (or "heptameter") couplets, both dating from the twelfth century. [4]
A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter.Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, [1] and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and ...
Decasyllabic quatrain is a poetic form in which each stanza consists of four lines of ten syllables each, usually with a rhyme scheme of AABB or ABAB. Examples of the decasyllabic quatrain in heroic couplets appear in some of the earliest texts in the English language, as Geoffrey Chaucer created the heroic couplet and used it in The Canterbury Tales. [1]
John Denham, influential writer of heroic couplets. The heroic couplet is a pair of iambic pentameter lines that rime together. Frequently, the term is associated with the balanced, closed couplets that dominated English verse from roughly 1640 to 1790, [22] [23] although the form dates back to Chaucer, and remains in use often in a looser form.
An elegiac couplet consists of one line of poetry in dactylic hexameter followed by a line in dactylic pentameter. Because dactylic hexameter is used throughout epic poetry , and because the elegiac form was always considered "lower style" than epic, elegists, or poets who wrote elegies, frequently wrote with epic poetry in mind and positioned ...
The elegiac couplet is presumed to be the oldest Greek form of epodic poetry (a form where a later verse is sung in response or comment to a previous one). Scholars, who even in the past did not know who created it, [3] theorize the form was originally used in Ionian dirges, with the name "elegy" derived from the Greek ε, λεγε ε, λεγε—"Woe, cry woe, cry!"
An example of the use of danda as caesurae in Indian poetry is in the "dohas" or couplet poems of Sant Kabir Das, a 15th-century poet who was central to the Bhakti movement in Hinduism. [7] Kabir employs the danda to mark semi-verse and verse, as in the following couplet:
The end rhyming couplet is often used to turn the idea that has been building through the poem. The Romantics played with these forms. Since the general topic and focus of the sonnet shifted in this era, it makes sense that the form would also change to mirror the content.