Terza Rima

Today we go back to a rhyming form, the terza rima. The best known and probably oldest recorded use of this form is in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Like many forms, it seems so simple - tercets (three line stanzas) with a repetitive, interlocking rhyme scheme. In the first stanza, lines one and three rhyme. In the second stanza, the first and third lines rhyme with line two in the first stanza. It looks like this aba, bcb, cdc, and so on for a lot of stanzas, but make note: this form came out in the Italian language, in which rhyming is easier. There are simply more rhyming words. In English, we can get bogged down. A question for translators of The Divine Comedy is whether or not the stanzas should rhyme in English or stay closer to the meaning in Italian. It’s been done both ways.

To bring this rhyming gallop to an end, poets use a variety of options from ending with no more stanzas, employing a rhyming couplet instead of a tercet with no middle line for an additional rhyme, or using a final couplet that loops back to use the initial a rhyme from the first stanza. Dante chose to end each section of the The Divine Comedy with a single line completing the rhyme scheme with the end-word of the second line of the preceding tercet.

While English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Wyatt popularized the form in the English language, some more recent examples are below. In English poets often use slant or near rhyme.

Sow     Sylvia Plath

God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
Through his lantern-lit
Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
With a penny slot

For thrift children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,
About to be
Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

In a parsley halo;
Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
Mire-smirched, blowzy,

Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise--
Bloat tun of milk
On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

Shrilling her hulk
To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast
Brobdingnag bulk

Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,
Fat-rutted eyes
Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood must

Thus wholly engross
The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,
Helmed, in cuirass,

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
By a grisly-bristled
Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.

But our farmer whistled,
Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,
And the green-copse-castled

Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,
Slowly, grunt
On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

A monument
Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want
Made lean Lent

Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,
Proceeded to swill
The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.

 

Acquainted with the Night    Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

 

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

 

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

 

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height

One luminary clock against the sky

 

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

 

 

 

 

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