COUPLET

The couplet was a highly popular form in the eighteenth century in England. Poets like Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, and John Dryden. It consists of two rhymed lines, usually written in iambic pentameter. Here are the opening lines of Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village."

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain,

Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed.