Riding rhyme

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Riding rhyme is an early form of heroic verse. It has been described variously as a couplet rhyme, in five accents, [1] and as a decasyllabic couplet. [2] It is derived from the rhythm of the poetry in parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales depicting the pilgrims as they rode along.

Other examples might be Browning's "How they Brought the Good News From Ghent To Aix", or W. H. Audens verses for "Night Mail".

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A couplet is a pair of successive lines of metre in poetry. A couplet usually consists of two successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse. In a run-on couplet, the meaning of the first line continues to the second.

The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.

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A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.

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A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.

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This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.

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Knittelvers is a kind of Germanic verse meter which originated in Germany during the Middle Ages. In Knittelvers, consecutive lines rhyme pairwise (AABB) and each line has four stresses. "Strict" Knittelvers has eight or nine syllables on each line, whereas "free" Knittelvers can use more or fewer. It may be considered a form of doggerel and is sometimes called "Knüttelvers" because of its rhythm. In German, this form of poetry was popular during the 15th and 16th centuries but rejected in the 17th before being brought back into use by Johann Christoph Gottsched in the 18th century.

Mantinada, plural mantinades (μαντινάδες) is the art of musical declamation (recitative) in form of a narrative or dialogue, sung in the rhythm of accompanying music. It is prominent in several parts of Greece, especially on the island of Crete where mantinades are performed in accompaniment of the Cretan lyra and Cretan laouto . The word is derived from Venetian matinada, meaning "morning song".

A hemistich is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Latin and Greek poetry, the hemistich is generally confined to drama. In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in hemistichs. The Roman poet Virgil employed hemistichs in the Aeneid to indicate great duress in his characters, where they were incapable of forming complete lines due to emotional or physical pain.

Vietnamese poetry originated in the form of folk poetry and proverbs. Vietnamese poetic structures include Lục bát, Song thất lục bát, and various styles shared with Classical Chinese poetry forms, such as are found in Tang poetry; examples include verse forms with "seven syllables each line for eight lines," "seven syllables each line for four lines", and "five syllables each line for eight lines." More recently there have been new poetry and free poetry.

Regulated verse – also known as Jintishi – is a development within Classical Chinese poetry of the shi main formal type. Regulated verse is one of the most important of all Classical Chinese poetry types. Although often regarded as a Tang dynasty innovation, the origin of regulated verse within the Classical Chinese poetic tradition is associated with Shen Yue (441–513), based on his "four tones and eight defects" (四聲八病) theory regarding tonality. There are three types of regulated verse: the eight-lined lüshi, the four-lined jueju, and the linked couplets of indeterminate length pailu. All regulated verse forms are rhymed on the even lines, with one rhyme being used throughout the poem. Also, and definitionally, the tonal profile of the poem is controlled. Furthermore, semantic and tonal parallelism is generally required of certain interior couplets. During the Tang dynasty, the "Shen-Song" team of Shen Quanqi and Song Zhiwen greatly contributed to the development of this Classical Chinese verse form.

References

  1. "Dictionary Definition: Riding rhyme". Online Dictionary. Retrieved 2019-09-09.
  2. Saintsbury, George (1910). "Glossary". Historical manual of English prosody. University of Connecticut Libraries. London : Macmillan. pp.  291.