Poetic Devices: Couplets and Refrains

Couplets

• Two lines of poetry, one after another, that rhyme and are the same length and rhythm

• Can be formal or run-on. In a formal (or closed) couplet, each of the two lines is ended, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse. In a run-on (or open) couplet, the meaning of the first line continues to the second.

• Formal – two different sentences

• Run on – the same sentence continued

• First used to describe successive lines of verse in Sir P. Sidney's Arcadia in 1590: "In singing some short coplets, whereto the one halfe beginning, the other halfe should answere."

• Often used in Early Modern English poetry – i.e. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

• Shakespeare used couplet at the ends of many of his sonnets to emphasize the theme and idea

• At the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Dr Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham:

“I do not like green eggs and ham.I do not like them Sam I am.”

Refrain

• A verse or phrase that is repeated at intervals throughout a song or poem, usually after the chorus or stanza

• Word roots: Vulgar Latin refringere, "to repeat", and later from Old French refraindre

• Similar to a chorus

• Refrains usually, but not always, come at the end of the verse. Some songs incorporate refrains into each verse

• “It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know…

I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

I and my Annabel Lee…”

(Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe)