rhymed couplets
Matching line endings
Rhymed couplets are pairs of consecutive lines in poetry that end with words that rhyme: The way a crow / Shook down on me / The dust of snow / From a hemlock tree—wait, that's not couplets.
A true couplet rhymes adjacent lines: True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
The form appears across traditions, from Shakespeare's sonnets (which end in couplets) to hip-hop verses.
- meterDevice that measures usage
- sonnetFourteen-line metered poem
- Augustan agePeriod of literary refinement
- doggerelTrivial, clumsy verse
- lineContinuous mark or queue
enjambment · lyric poetry · epigram · closed · beat · verse form · quatrain · Neoclassicism · Pope · caesura · iambic pentameter · jingle · Elizabethan era · wit · heroic · iambic · chiming · stanza
rhymed coupletsblank verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter
free verse · prose poetry · prose · stream of consciousness · experimental poetry