couplet
Other forms: couplets
A couplet is two lines of poetry that usually rhyme. Here's a famous couplet: "Good night! Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say good night till it be morrow."
The couplet above comes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which is a play, not a poem. But Shakespeare often used rhyming couplets at the end of scenes to signal the ending. Couplets are very common in poetry. Often whole poems are written in couplet form — two lines of rhyming poetry, followed by two more lines with a different rhyme, and so on. Robert Frost, one of America's great poets, wrote many poems using couplets.
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a stanza consisting of two successive lines of verse; usually rhymedtypes:closed coupleta rhymed couplet that forms a complete syntactic unitheroic coupleta couplet consisting of two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter and written in an elevated styletype of:stanzaa fixed number of lines of verse forming a unit of a poem
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two items of the same kind
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Vocabulary lists containing couplet
One of the stumbling blocks when trying to study poetry is that it seems like a different world. Familiar things, like words, are put to unfamiliar use, and there is an entire descriptive vocabulary that is completely foreign and quite often puzzling. This list seeks to explain the words used to describe poetry through examples from famous poems. Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, "If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry," but we are willing to take that risk to make the world of literary analysis a little clearer and further illuminate the mystery of poetry.
If you want to be well-versed in poetry, review this vocabulary list. Learn about parts of a poem, genres of poetry, literary devices, rhyme and meter, and more. This list is truly poetry in motion!
You'll understand rhyme's reason when you practice this list of words related the structure of poetry. To learn even more about poetry, explore our lists on Genre and Literary Devices.