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Unit 2: Major Literary Terms-II

2.4.2 Petrarchan Conceit Notes
The Petrarchan conceit, used in love poetry, exploits a particular set of images for comparisons with
the despairing lover and his unpitying but idolized mistress. For instance, the lover is a ship on a
stormy sea, and his mistress “a cloud of dark disdain”; or else the lady is a sun whose beauty and
virtue shine on her lover from a distance.
The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is often described using oxymoron, for instance
uniting peace and war, burning and freezing, and so forth. But images which were novel in the
sonnets of Petrarch became clichés in the poetry of later imitators. Romeo uses hackneyed Petrarchan
conceits when describing his love for Rosaline as “bright smoke, cold fire, sick health”.

2.5 Couplet

A couplet is a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the
same meter. While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do. A poem may use white space to mark out
couplets if they do not rhyme. Couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter are called heroic couplets.
The Poetic epigram is also in the couplet form.

Couplets can also appear in more complex rhyme schemes. For example, Shakespearean
sonnets end with a couplet.

Rhyming couplets are one of the simplest rhyme schemes in poetry. Chaucer’s The Canterbury
Tales are written in rhyming couplets. John Dryden in the 17th century and Alexander Pope in the
18th century were both well known for their writing in heroic couplets. They can be found in books
such as midsummer nights dream.
Because the rhyme comes so quickly in rhyming couplets, it tends to call attention to itself. Good
rhyming couplets tend to “snap” as both the rhyme and the idea come to a quick close in two lines.
Here are some examples of rhyming couplets where the sense as well as the sound “rhymes”:

True wit is nature to advantage dress’d;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.
— Alexander Pope
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
is idle, biologically speaking.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay (at the end of a sonnet)

On the other hand, because rhyming couplets have such a predictable rhyme scheme, they can feel
artificial and plodding. Here is a Pope parody of the predictable rhymes of his era:

Where-e’er you find “the cooling western breeze,”
In the next line, it “whispers through the trees;”
If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep,”
The reader’s threatened (not in vain) with “sleep.”

2.6 Elegy

In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a
lament for the dead. “Elegy” may denote a type of musical work, usually of a sad or somber nature.

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