Definition and examples of tercet or triplet – Literary terms

Definition and examples of tercet or triplet – Literary terms

Definition and examples of tercet or triplet – Literary terms

A group, often a STANZA, of three lines usually having the same rhyme; also called a triplet. Here is the final tercet of Robert Frost's poem “Provide, Provide":

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

The interlocking three-line stanzas in TERZA RIMA are called tercets, as are the three-line stanzas in the VILLANELLE. The term is also used to designate each of the two three-line groups that make up the SESTET of the ITALIAN SONNET.

Tercet or triplet from Penguin Dictionary of Literary terms:

tercet  (F 'triplet') A stanza of three lines linked by rhyme, as in terza-rima (q.v.).  Also as one of a pair of triplets which makes up the sestet  (q.v.) of a sonnet  (q.v.) or as three consecutive rhyming lines (known as a triplet  in  a poem which is largely written in couplets ).

These tercets are from Tennyson's  Two Voices:

A still small voice spake unto me:

'Thou art so full of misery,

Were it not better not to be ?'

 

Then to the still small voice I said:

'Let  me not cast in endless shade

What is so wonderfully made.'

 

Tercet or triplet from a glossary of literary terms:  

The tercet or triplet is a stanza of three lines, typically with a single rhyme. The lines may be the same length (as in Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” 1648, written in tercets of iambic tetrameter), or else of varying lengths. In Richard Crashaw’s “Wishes to His Supposed Mistress” (1646), the lines of each tercet are successively in iambic dimeter, trimeter, and tetrameter:

Who e’er she be

That not impossible she

That shall command my heart and me.

 

Definition and examples of tercet or triplet – Literary terms

Tercet or triplet From Oxford Dictionary of Literary terms:

The tercet or triplet is a sequence of  three verse lines sharing  the same  RHYME, sometimes appearing as a variation among  the HEROIC COUPLETS of Dryden and some 18th-century poets: or any group or STANZA of  three lines. Triplets occurring among heroic couplets are sometimes indicated by a brace, as in Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711):

Musick resembles Poetry, in each

Are nameless Graces which no Methods teach,

And which a Master-Hand alone can reach.

See also:

SESTET,

STANZA,

TERZA RIMA,

VILLANELLE.