Rhyming Couplet: A couplet is a pair of lines of verse. It usually consists of two
lines that rhyme and have the same meter. Because the rhyme comes so quickly
in rhyming couplets, it tends to call attention to itself. Good rhyming couplets tend
to "snap" as both the rhyme and the idea come to a quick close in two lines.
Couplets can also appear in more complex rhyme schemes. For example,
Shakespearean sonnets end with a couplet. Here is the prologue to Romeo and
Juliet, which is written in the form of a sonnet and, as per the structure of a
sonnet, ends in a rhyming couplet.
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
An example of Shakespeare’s use of rhyming couplets can be seen in Act
2, Scene 1, when Puck says:
PUCK (Beginning of Act 2, Scene 1)
The king doth keep his revels here to-night:
Take heed the queen come not within his sight;
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;
But she perforce withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy:
And now they never meet in grove or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,
But, they do square, that all their elves for fear
Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.
Paraphrase what Puck is saying in his lines above: