What Is a Heroic Couplet?

What dire offence from amorous causes springs,

What mighty contests rise from trivial things,

I sing--This verse to CARYLL, Muse! is due:

This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:

Slight is the subject, but not so the praise,

If She inspire, and He approve my lays.

Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel

A well-bred lord t'assault a gentle belle?

Oh say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,

Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?

In tasks so bold, can little men engage,

And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage?

--The Rape of the Lock, by Alexander Pope

A typical couplet line is ten syllables long, with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. The pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one is called iambic; because there are normally five stresses in each line, the meter is called pentameter. Each couplet--that is, each set of two lines--is "sealed" by an end-rhyme, with the sound repetition usually involving only the final stressed syllable. The iambic pentameter couplet came to be called "heroic" because by the middle of the seventeenth century it was regarded as the proper form for dealing with "heroic" subjects--deeds of high accomplishment and matters of public interest and admiration--"proper" because it appeared to fit fairly unobtrusively the prose rhythms of the English language (long considered to be basically iambic) and because the five-stress line seemed most often to provide dignity and distance without intruding too much formality or aloofness.