Heroic Couplet

Created: March 14, 2021 11:17 AM
Forest status: #soil
Last Edited: 2022-12-18
Topics: poetry

'Heroic couplets’ are rhyming couplets written in iambic pentameter They’re called ‘heroic’ because they were used in translations of epic poetry into English – poems about heroes from classical mythology. Heroic couplets thus suggest grandeur and ‘weightiness’, although the flipside of this is that they have sometimes been used to create the opposite effect: for instance, Alexander Pope, in his mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock, uses heroic couplets to summon the lofty world of gods and goddesses in a poem about an upper-class woman having a lock of her hair cut off:

This Nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourish’d two Locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspir’d to deck
With shining ringlets the smooth iv’ry neck.
Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains,
And mighty hearts are held in slender chains.

Heroic couplets were also popular in the eighteenth century – before the advent of Romanticism brought in a preference for blank verse – since they suggested order and neatness, which neoclassical or ‘Augustan’ poets like Pope, Samuel Johnson, and others wanted to bring to poetry. Johnson in particular wrote verse satires and didactic poems using heroic couplets.