A heroic couplet is a traditional form for

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meani ...

, commonly used in epic and

narrative poetry Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not need rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may be ...

, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in

iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Iam ...

. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by

Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...

in the ''

Legend of Good Women ''The Legend of Good Women'' is a poem in the form of a dream vision by Geoffrey Chaucer during the fourteenth century. The poem is the third longest of Chaucer's works, after ''The Canterbury Tales'' and ''Troilus and Criseyde'', and is possib ...

'' and the ''

Canterbury Tales ''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's '' magnum opu ...

'',Hobsbaum, Philip. ''Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form''. Routledge (1996) p.23 and generally considered to have been perfected by

John Dryden '' John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the p ...

and

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...

in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.

Example

A frequently-cited example illustrating the use of heroic couplets is this passage from ''Cooper's Hill'' by

John Denham John Denham may refer to: * John Denham (died 1556 or later), English MP for Shaftesbury * John Denham (judge), (1559–1639), father of the poet below, and one of the Ship Money judges * John Denham (poet) (1615–1669), English poet * John Den ...

, part of his description of the

Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...

History

The term "heroic couplet" is sometimes reserved for couplets that are largely ''closed'' and self-contained, as opposed to the enjambed couplets of poets like

John Donne John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathe ...

. The heroic couplet is often identified with the

English Baroque English Baroque is a term used to refer to modes of English architecture that paralleled Baroque architecture in continental Europe between the Great Fire of London (1666) and roughly 1720, when the flamboyant and dramatic qualities of Baroque ...

works of

and

, who used the form for their translations of the epics of

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: th ...

and

Homer Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...

, respectively. Major poems in the closed couplet, apart from the works of Dryden and Pope, are

Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...

's ''

The Vanity of Human Wishes ''The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated'' is a poem by the English author Samuel Johnson. It was written in late 1748 and published in 1749 (see 1749 in poetry). It was begun and completed while Johnson was busy writin ...

'',

Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728 – 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright, dramatist and poet, who is best known for his novel '' The Vicar of Wakefield'' (1766), his pastoral poem '' The Deserted Village'' (1770), and his ...

's '' The Deserted Village'', and

John Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculos ...

's '' Lamia''. The form was immensely popular in the 18th century. The looser type of couplet, with occasional enjambment, was one of the standard verse forms in medieval narrative poetry, largely because of the influence of the

Variations

English heroic couplets, especially in Dryden and his followers, are sometimes varied by the use of the occasional alexandrine, or

hexameter Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It w ...

line, and triplet. Often these two variations are used together to heighten a climax. The breaking of the regular pattern of rhyming pentameter pairs brings about a sense of

poetic closure Poetic closure is the sense of conclusion given at the end of a poem. Barbara Herrnstein Smith Barbara Herrnstein Smith (born 1932) is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work ''Contingencies of Value: Alternative Pers ...

. Here are two examples from Book IV of Dryden's translation of the ''

Aeneid The ''Aeneid'' ( ; la, Aenē̆is or ) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of ...

''.

''Alexandrine''

''Alexandrine and Triplet''

Modern use

Twentieth-century authors have occasionally made use of the heroic couplet, often as an allusion to the works of poets of previous centuries. An example of this is Vladimir Nabokov's novel '' Pale Fire'', the second section of which is a 999-line, 4-canto poem largely written in loose heroic couplets with frequent

enjambment In poetry, enjambment ( or ; from the French ''enjamber'') is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning 'runs over' or 'steps over' from one poetic line to the next, without punctuation. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped. The ori ...

. Here is an example from the first canto: The use of heroic couplets in translations of Greco-Roman epics has also inspired translations of non-Western works into English. In 2021, Vietnamese translator Nguyen Binh published a translation of the Vietnamese epic poem '' Tale of Kiều'', in which the '' lục bát'' couplets of the original were rendered into heroic couplets. Binh named

and

as major influences on their work, which also mimicked the spelling of Dryden and Pope's translations to evoke the medieval air of the Vietnamese original. An example of the heroic couplet translation can be found below:

References

{{Alexander Pope Poetic forms