Correlative verse is a

literary device A narrative technique (also, in fiction, a fictional device) is any of several storytelling methods the creator of a story uses, thus effectively relaying information to the audience or making the story more complete, complex, or engaging. Some ...

used in

poetry Poetry (from the Greek language, Greek word ''poiesis'', "making") is a form of literature, literary art that uses aesthetics, aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meaning (linguistics), meanings in addition to, or in ...

around the world; it is characterized by the matching of items in two different pluralities. An example is found in an epigram from the ''

Greek Anthology The ''Greek Anthology'' () is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the Classical Greece, Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of the material of the ''Greek Anthology'' comes from two manuscripts, the ''Palatine ...

'': "You ine, areboldness, youth, strength, wealth, country irst plurality/ to the shy, the old, the weak, the poor, the foreigner (second plurality]". Another example is found in a couplet by 16th-century poet

George Peele George Peele (baptised 25 July 1556 – buried 9 November 1596) was an English translator, poet, and dramatist, who is most noted for his supposed, but not universally accepted, collaboration with William Shakespeare on the play ''Titus Andronic ...

: "Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen; / Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green". Characteristically notorious for correlative verse is

Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...

poetry, which proffers such cryptic examples as Þórðr Særeksson's: where the elemental pattern is ABCDABCD, i.e. "" (Became herself of her son Guðrún the slayer), etc.

See also

References

Further reading