by Michelle Mclean

Created on: March 06, 2009   Last Updated: March 10, 2009

Heroic couplets were once the epitome of poetry. If you had to read Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, you've read heroic couplets. Poets used this form, not just for "regular" poetry, but for social commentaries, arguments, political dissertations - anything and everything you could think of was put into heroic couplet form. Its name was even derived from the distinguished and loft subject matter often contained in it's verses. This form of poetry was immensely popular until about the end of the 18th century, when this poor form lost its popularity. Nowadays, it is very rarely seen, which is, in my humble opinion, a crying shame. So, what are heroic couplets? And how on earth would you go about writing one?

What are they?

Simply put, a heroic couplet is a pair of rhyming lines, usually written in iambic pentameter.

Elements:

1. Must have pairs of rhyming lines.

This is fairly straight forward. The rhyme scheme would be aabbccddee. In other words, your first and second lines will rhyme, the third and fourth lines will rhyme, the fifth and sixth, and so forth.

For example, let's look at a few lines from one of my favorite poems, Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book"

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view

As you can see, the first two lines end in a rhyming pair, as do the third and fourth lines, and so on until the end of the poem. Heroic couplets have been historically used for epic poetry. They tend to be very long. But they don't have to be. A poem can be any length.

2. The meter is usually iambic pentameter.

The meter of a poem is its rhythm. In order to find the meter of a poem, you "scan" it for how many stressed and unstressed syllables each line has. Then you add them up. Because heroic couplets are usually written with ten syllables in iambic pentameter, each line must have five stressed syllables per line (penta = five.therefore "pentameter").

For example, let's look at another line from, "The Author to Her Book." I will put the stressed syllables in parentheses

Thou (ill)-formed (off)spring (of) my (fee)ble (brain)

As you can see, there are five stressed syllables.

Now, where does the iambic part come in? Well, the pattern of the stresses determines whether a poem is iambic or something else. To be iambic, the syllables of a poem line must follow a pattern of unstressed/stressed. Let's look again at our line

Thou (ill)-formed

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