Page 31 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes • “I had butterflies in my stomach” is a metaphor, referring to my nervousness feeling as if
there were flying insects in my stomach. To say “it was like having some butterflies in my
stomach” would be a simile, because it uses the word like which is missing in the metaphor.

3.2 Heroic Couplet

A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry;
it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The
rhyme is always masculine. Use of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the
Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is also widely credited with first extensive
use of iambic pentameter.
Example
A frequently-cited example illustrating the use of heroic couplets is this passage from Cooper’s Hill
by John Denham, part of his description of the Thames:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.

3.2.1 History
The term “heroic couplet” is sometimes reserved for couplets that are largely closed and self-contained,
as opposed to the enjambed couplets of poets like John Donne. The heroic couplet is often identified
with the English Baroque works of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Major poems in the closed
couplet, apart from the works of Dryden and Pope, are Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human
Wishes, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, and John Keats’s Lamia. The form was immensely
popular in the 18th century. The looser type of couplet, with occasional enjambment, was one of the
standard verse forms in medieval narrative poetry, largely because of the influence of the Canterbury
Tales.

3.2.2 Variations
English heroic couplets, especially in Dryden and his followers, are sometimes varied by the use of
the occasional alexandrine, or hexameter line, and triplet. Often these two variations are used together
to heighten a climax. The breaking of the regular pattern of rhyming pentameter pairs brings about a
sense of poetic closure. Here are three examples from Book IV of Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid.

Triplet

Nor let him then enjoy supreme command;
But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand,
And lie unburied on the barren sand!
(ll. 890-892)

Alexandrine
Her lofty courser, in the court below,
Who his majestic rider seems to know,

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