Monday, May 14, 2018

Terza Terza Terza

As you may have noticed, I've been fiddling with terza rima. Something I hadn't paid attention to: there are a couple of ways to end them.

"...there are a few different ways you can choose to end your terza rima poem. One way is to simply end it with the last stanza. Another way is to add a couplet, which is a set of two lines which rhyme. Or, you can choose to add one extra line that stands alone to conclude your story. Try writing more than one terza rima, and experimenting with ending them in all different ways!"

The last way is the method used by Dante. I have followed that method so far, although I didn't isolate the last line visually.

I see that Robert Frost, in a poem included at the link, used the final couplet method, as did Shelley in his West Wind ode. Why haven't I noticed this before?

I suppose the Ode to the West Wind is the best known English poem in this form. He uses a lot of off-rhymes to solve the problem of "how do I keep coming up with 3 rhymes at a time?"

Terza Rima is an interloper in English,
Which is insufficiently jinglish.

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