Couplet

Couplet (pronounced kuhp-lit)

(1) In literature, most often in poetic form, a pair of successive lines of verse, usually rhymed and of the same metre.

(2) A pair; a couple.

(3) In musical composition, any of the contrasting sections of a rondo occurring between statements of the refrain.

(4) In computing, a pair of interdependent programming statements.

(5) In the induction or exhaust systems of internal combustion engines, a pipe running between main tubes for the purpose of flow-balancing.

(6) In town planning and traffic management, a pair of one-way streets which carry opposing directions of traffic through gridded urban areas.

(7) In taxonomy, a pair of two mutually exclusive choices in a dichotomous key.

1570-1580: From the Middle French couple (a little pair), the construct being couple from the Old French couple, from the Vulgar Latin cōpla, from the Classical Latin cōpula (doublet of copule) + -et from the Middle French and Old French –et from the Medieval Latin –ittus (Suffix indicating diminution or affection).  Couplet was used first in poetry in the 1570s and in music since 1876.  Later adoptions all emerged in the twentieth century or later.

Closed and Heroic Couplets

A rhyming couplet is two lines of around the same length which rhyme and complete one thought.  Rhyming words are those of a similar sound when spoken; they don't of necessity have to be similar in spelling.  A couplet is closed when the lines form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence whereas a heroic couplet is written often in iambic pentameter, though with some variation of the meter.

A closed couplet from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Several characteristics distinguish the heroic couplet from the regular couplet. A heroic couplet is always rhymed and is usually in iambic pentameter and is also usually closed, meaning that both lines are end-stopped and are a self-contained grammatical unit.

This rhymed, closed, iambic pentameter couplet from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 is not however a heroic couplet.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

That’s because for a couplet to be heroic, it demands a heroic setting.  The subjectivity inherent in this is why satirists were attracted to the form, using the heroic form when writing of the mundane or banal; the Dadaists being the twentieth century’s most celebrated practitioners.

This fragment is from John Dryden's translation of Virgil's The Aeneid, and because it’s one of the dramatic epic poems of antiquity, these are heroic couplets. 

Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join'd;

But westward to the sea the sun declin'd.

Intrench'd before the town both armies lie,

While Night with sable wings involves the sky.

Like many seminal literary forms, the heroic couplet attracted parody, known in literary theory as the mock-heroic, most commonly associated with Alexander Pope, his best-known example of this work of this kind being The Rape of the Lock in which a minor transgression is written of in a narrative of epic proportions, recalling the legends and magic of mythology.

Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey,

Dost sometimes Counsel take—and sometimes Tea.

In a case which legal commentators described as "speculative" and "optimistic" Lindsay Lohan in 2011 sued Rapper Pitbull (Armando Christian Pérez, b 1981), objecting to some lines in his single Give Me Everything (2011), the offending couplet being:

Hustlers move aside, so I’m tiptoein’, to keep flowin’

 I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan.

Rapper Pitbull.

Grounds for the suit were the negative connotations in the text and claims she should have been compensated for the use of her name in the song.  The suit sought unspecified damages for characterizing her as a person who has been to jail, when actually she is a professional actor, designer, and devotee of charitable causes. It was alleged the lyrics were clearly “destined to do irreparable harm” to Lohan’s reputation.  The case was dismissed by a federal judge who ruled the words were protected by the First Amendment, which covers freedom of speech and creative expression.