The heroic couplet continuum

Abstract

Many readers firmly associate eighteenth-century poetry with couplets, as did Plath’s Esther Greenwood, and especially with those pairs of iambic pentameter lines known as “ heroic couplets.” Even readers well aware of other verse forms in the period tend to think of the heroic couplet as the age’s emblem. This tendency bears examination since the pentameter couplet has been one of the most common poetic forms in English, from Chaucer into the nineteenth century. It made several appearances in the twentieth century and not only, as we might assume, in witty epigrams or light verse. Here are the opening, wistful lines of Robert Frost’s The Tuft of Flowers , from his first book, A Boy’s Will (1915): I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. The dew was gone that made his blade so keen Before I came to view the levelled scene. I looked for him behind an isle of trees; I listened for his whetstone on the breeze. But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been,—alone … Frost’s are not the sort of lines brought to mind by the phrase “The Age of Pope.” Nor are these lines, from Browning: Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said “Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and passion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, How such a glance came there; so, not the first …