Tuesday, November 3, 2015

What is an example of a heroic couplet in Anne Bradstreet's "An Author to Her Book"?

Anne Bradstreet's entire poem "The Author to Her Book" is written in rhyming couplets. A rhyming couplet is a pair of two lines that display ending rhyme (the last word in each line rhymes). A heroic couplet is a more specific pair of lines in that the two lines have an end rhyme and also are written in iambic pentameter. The meter of the line is the number of syllables and the stresses, or emphases, placed on the syllables. In a line of iambic pentameter, there will be ten syllables, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (five times per line, making ten total syllables). 

In Bradstreet's poem, the first two couplets, lines 1 and 2 and lines 3 and 4, are heroic couplets because each pair of lines rhymes and is written in iambic pentameter. For example, in lines 1-2, Bradstreet writes: 



Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,


Who after birth didst by my side remain 



The words at the end of each line--brain and remain--rhyme, making this a couplet. Each line also contains ten syllables, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. If you read the lines out loud, you would stress all of the even-numbered syllables (ill/off/of/fee/brain), giving them more emphasis and lending the line its cadence or rhythm.


Most of the lines in this poem are ten syllables long (line 5, for example, appears to have eleven syllables) and the entire poem is arranged in rhyming couplets. Lines 1-2 are just one example, but you could look at each pair of lines in the poem and explain them in the same way I did above.  

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