Poem Commentary

A ‘terza rima’, first used by the Italian poet Dante in his Divine Comedy, is a series of tercets using chain rhyme in the scheme a/b/a | b/c/b | c/d/c | d/e/d. There is no limit to the no. of stanzas, but the terza rima is closed with a single line or couplet rhyming with the middle line of the final tercet (thus giving each and every line a rhyme). There is no set meter either, but for terza rimas written in English, lines of 10 syllables or iambic pentameter are generally preferred. Chaucer first introduced the form into English literature in the fourteenth century with his Complaint to His Lady. Five centuries later, Byron, Milton and Shelley adopted it, with the latter’s Ode to the West Wind remaining a popular work. Hardy also employed terza rima’s cross-stanza rhyme scheme to inter-link the characters in his Friends Beyond. More recently, Frost and Plath have written in the form, with the former’s Acquainted With the Night often quoted as an exemplary terza rima.