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Terza Rima

What is a terza rima?

TERZA RIMA, or "third rhyme," is a form of verse adapted from the Italian poets of the 13th century. It consists of tercets written in iambic pentameter ( will be explained below) and the concluding line may be a couplet <terza rima sonnet> or a single line. Poet Dante is mostly accredited with inventing this form but it was widely used by many Classical poets such as Dante, Shelley, Lord Byron, W.H. Auden and Archibald MacLeish.

What is iambic pentameter?

Iambic pentameter is the building block of about two-thirds of medieval and Renaissance English poetic forms. Iambic pentameter is used in rime royal, Chaucerian couplets, blank verse (one of the play-writing media of Shakespeare and his contemporaries), ballades, sestinas, and Spenserian stanza. Neoclassical poets used iambic pentameter in heroic couplets, and later poets have added their sonnets and works in blank verse to English and American literature. The upshot: people who master iambic pentameter and the ability to rhyme can write a good many medieval, Renaissance forms, eighteenth, and nineteenth century poetic forms.

Iambic pentameter itself is a rhythmical pattern of syllables. The "iambic" part means that the rhythm goes from an unstressed syllable to a stressed one, as happens in words like divine, caress, bizarre, and delight. It sounds sort of like a heartbeat: daDUM, daDUM, daDUM. Each iambic unit is called a foot Iambic pentametric line is a sentence of 10 syllables with alternating strong and weak sounds < Refer to class 4- syllables for detailed explanation on strong and weak syllables>

An iambic line would look like this

STRONG/weak/ STRONG/weak/ STRONG/weak/ STRONG/weak/ STRONG/weak

When the line ends with a weak syllable it is said to have a feminine ending. IT can also look like this:

Weak/STRONG/ Weak/STRONG/Weak/STRONG/Weak/STRONG/Weak/STRONG/

Since the above line ends with a strong syllable it is said to have a masculine ending.

Some examples of lines written in iambic pentameter

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night
But surely Adam cannot be excused
We hold these truths to be self-evident

(Thomas Jefferson in "The Declaration of Independence," line 1)

History Of Terza Rima

I quote from the 1911 edition of encyclopedia Love To Know – “Its origin has been attributed by some to the three-lined ritourhel, which was an early Italian form of popular poetry, and by others to the sirventes of the Provencal troubadours. The serventese in-catenato of the latter was an arrangement of triple rhymes, and unquestionably appears to have a relation with terza rima; this connection becomes almost a certainty when we consider the admiration expressed by the Tuscan poets of the i3th century for the metrical inventions of their forerunners, the Provencals. In Italian, a stanza of terza rima consists of three lines of eleven syllables, linked with the next stanza, and with the next, and so on, by a recurrence of rhymes: thus aba, bcb, cdc, ded, &c., so that, however long the poem is, it can be divided nowhere without severing the continuity of the rhyme. Schuchardt has developed an ingenious theory that these successive terzinas are really chains of ritournera just as ottava rima, according to the same theory, is a chain of rispetti. There were, unquestionably, chains of interwoven triple rhymed lines before the days of Dante, but it was certainly he who raised terza rima from the category of folk-verse, and gave it artistic character. What this character is may best be seen by an examination of the austere and majestic lines with which the Inferno opens, no more perfect example of terza rima having ever been composed:” (http://98.1911encyclopedia.org/T/TE/TERZA_RIMA.htm)

Rhyme Scheme

The rhyming scheme is interlocked and open and follows this pattern: Aba bcb cdc ded efe fgf and so on as long as it goes. Consider the following portion taken from Shelley “Ode to the West Wind”

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, a
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead b
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing a

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red. b
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, c
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed . . . b

There is no fixed length to a terza rima but they are generally used to tell a story of epic proportions and hence normally easily run over 100 lines.

– Continued

Photograph by Rajender Krishan

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