For the difficulty/constraining part, how much can you really say in two lines, in Western Culture anyway? As soon as you begin the first line, the need to resolve it looms there at the end of the second. Talk about creative pressure! It's no wonder that Pope, for one, extended the form into epic proportions. Still, even in those long narrative works, like The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, Pope had to satisfy the doublet format, but over and over while advancing a narrative. And undoubtedly that's what couplets are meant to do, move a poem forward audibly and rhythmically, with pace.
Just as in a sonnet, a couplet contains a volta, or a turn. It's just that it comes fast and frequent, leaving you little time or space to build a proposition or to illustrate the general point you plan to make after the turn. This is why the couplet form is aphoristic (go back to our project on aphorism in the blog post for 9.26.18 for more background), tending toward structures of statement/observation, set-up/deliver, point/counterpoint and so on. The couplet has long been associated with "wit," which over literary history has been defined as ingenuity, imagination, "genuis" (meaning uniqueness and essence, not brains), cleverness, quickness of mind. Wit has long been associated with satire and irony. In our time, wit has taken on "funny" as one of its main definitions. Mostly though, throughout literary history wit has meant "aptness," or as Pope said, often thought but n'er so well express'd.
And that's what the couplet goes after: apt expression. What contributes to this, or rather, what's the vehicle for aptness in a traditional couplet? The rhyme: a-a, b-b, c-c, d-d on through the alphabet if necessary. The rhyming words set up and then resolve a situation or proposition, a problem. They create an opening and then closure, and thereby create and satisfy expectation in rapid sequence. You might say, the rhyming couplet runs on tension, tension being a staple of poetry, drama, fiction--all kinds of writing with emotional impact.
Modern and post-modern poetry still deploy the couplet. Leaf through any lit mag or anthology of recent verse and you'll eventually come across the form. I think it was much more in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s than it is today, but you can still find it being published.
The form varies from the Popian to the post-Modern:
A fool might once alone himself expose,
Now one in verse makes many more in prose.
This very quotable pair from Pope's early "An Essay on Criticism," makes the somewhat simple point that verse amplifies the voice, and the more complex point that writing bad verse, or writing bad thinking in verse, amplifies one's vices as well as one's voice. What makes it quotable, of course, is the couplet's brevity, its quick setup and delivery, and its rhyme, and for Pope, the more exact the rhyme, the better. Here are some more examples from Pope:
Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,
And rise to faults true critics dare not mend;
--An Essay on Criticism
I yearn for the stuffy dinner party sometime where I can lay that one on the table!
Men, some to business, some to pleasure take;
But every woman is at heart a rake;
No room here to go into the argument Pope is forwarding in these lines from "Epistle II: To a Lady," so suffice it to say he's comparing the sexes, and acknowledging that woman is the stronger, craftier, more purposeful and resolute of the two.
And this pair of lines, from the opening of "The Rape of the Lock," is one of my favorites for its delicacy of voice, almost too delicate by half:
Say what strange motive, Goddess, could compel
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?
Compare that to the opening invocation of the Muse in The Iliad!
But couplets haven't always been ne'r so well express'd as Pope wrote them and, like all the forms we've practiced here at W@1, the couplet has been thoroughly modernized and adapted not just to modern English, but our contemporary Western sensibilities. Some of them, anyway. And like all those forms, the more contemporary--you might say post-Modern--treatment of them is gestural at best, a kind of nod that only the initiated will understand. Take a look at some "couplets" from C. K. Williams, for example, who spent most of his career extending couplets, tercets and quatrains into wide, un-metered lines that never fit the width of the books they appeared in, always needed to be wrapped under themselves like lengths of something or other packed into too-short boxes. Take a look at this series of "couplets":
I always knew him as "Bobby the poet," though whether he ever was one or not,
someone who lives in words, making a world from their music, might be a question.
In those strange years of hippiedom and "people-power," saying you were an artist
made you one, but at least Bobby acted the way people think poets are supposed to.
He dressed plainly, but with flair, spoke little, yet listened with genuine attention,
and a kind of preoccupied, tremulous seriousness always seemed to absorb him.
This is the opening to Williams' poem "The Poet," collected in his book Repair. It goes on for another 29 "stanzas," all of which are produced from lines almost identical in length--and every single couplet overflows the page by from one to three words, never more. No couplet maintains what you might call a metrical beat, though rhythm abounds, the rhythm of daily, sometimes ruminative speech, for Williams' style usually swings from the conversational to the ruminative to the narrative of character analysis, and then deeply philosophical. The lines can come off as flacid, intense, lyrical and flowing, transactional (as in a conversation), and even Frostian. All within one or two series of couplets. In other words, these lines are proto-prose.
Still, they are lines of poetry, formed into couplets or at least "doublets." A return is entered at the end of each first and second line, with an extra return at the end of every second line. This means decision. The writer has chosen to put the return there, and then an extra space at even intervals, creating what looks like long, languid couplets. (Some might describe the style as enervated or the effect as enervating.) For a writer, this process establishes a kind of rhythm, subtle as it is, that may be intellectual or rhetorical more than metrical; it is evenly repetitive; and it therefore must create expectation, both for the writer and the reader. Which is exactly what couplets do.
I found this sequence of two-liners in a poem by David Young, titled "The Accident" (I didn't have to look far or for very long among my bookshelves, either!):
The poem walks through a drizzle
wearing overalls. It loads
big Nouns in a pickup truck
climbs in the cab, guns the
motor and is off, knuckles white,
peering at silence among trees
past smoking fields blue meadows
over bridges of electric air
to unmarked crossings where the long
trains of the past come through
with the momentum of all their stations
and the truck must be hit
exploding in every direction
while the poem somehow survives
in the circle of wreckage and rain
where the X has begun to spin.
Isn't this a wonderful little lyric? You'll recall from conversations last year, maybe, that William Carlos Williams wrote often in three-line stanzas meant to capture American cadences of speech. Well, here the cadence is in two lines. Do we call them couplets? Pope might not. But again, as with C. K. Williams' poem above, the poet had to decide when to end one line and go to the next, and at some point decided to put in a second return after every second line. This, along with the shortness of the lines, creates a forward-downward flow that pulls you through the poem, first to last, dropping you inside that image of an X spinning. This decision process no doubt influenced his choice of words ending each line of the poem: will they each be concrete nouns, adverbs, verbs, or maybe he'll let an article ("the") carry the line over. All writerly choices to be sifted, weighed and committed to.
The writing of couplets forces those choices in unique ways, for when you try this--and you will, soon--you'll experience a small sensation of open-close, open-close, open-close, perhaps like your heart beating, even if your thought or narrative carries you right past the couplet's end. Sooner rather than later, this sensation will come to feel like an insistence--if things are going right--and then you'll be in it, a poem of couplets.
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