COUPLETS

The most popular poetry patterns are rhyming schemes. Here's an example of a few couplet stanzas:

Stanza#1
"She is dead!" they said to him; "come away;
Kiss her and leave her-thy love is clay!"

Stanza#2
They smoothed her tresses of dark brown hair;
On her forehead of stone they laid it fair;

Stanza#3
With a tender touch they closed up well
The sweet thin lips that had secrets to tell;
("He and She" by Sir Edwin Arnold)

You know a couple means two. So a couplet is a pair of lines of poetry that are usually rhymed. We think the idea of the couplet came from the French and English. There are lots of ways to write different types of couplets. Couplets can also be used to "build" other poems.

Rhyme (Couplet and Bout Rimes)

Most people think of rhymes when they hear the word "poem". A true rhyme consists of two words that end in the same sound. "Bright" and "light" is a true rhyming combination.

Useful tool - The Semantic Rhyming Dictionary

Poets often use rhymes in different ways to create patterns in their work. The simplest rhyming pattern is the COUPLET. A couplet is a two line rhyme.

"I scraped my knee
On that tree"

. . . is a CLOSED couplet, which is to say, that it contains a complete thought.

"I took a good look at my hand.
Inspected each finger, and"

. . . is an OPEN couplet. The thought runs into another verse:

"Payed close attention to my thumb.
Then I thought, 'This is dumb!'"

Back in the days before video games, TV, and roadtrips, some people would entertain themselves by doing BOUT-RIMES. This is when someone provides a list of rhymed words and everyone else would use the words (in any order) to create a poem. It didn't matter whether the poem made sense or was completely silly, as long as all the words were used.

For practice, use the following list of words to make a poem of couplets:

wood / hood
white / bite
run / sun
cold / mold
hope / rope

A couplet is a poem or a stanza within a poem which contains two lines of matched verse in succession. They can be matched in length, in rhyme, or both. The shortest couplet that forms a poem is perhaps "Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes" by Strickland Gillilan:

Adam
Had 'em.