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Stopped couplet

Form
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A rhymed couplet that concludes decisively at the end of the second line, with no enjambment or syntactic carryover, creating a sense of finality or epigrammatic closure.

Detailed Definition
A stopped couplet is a rhymed pair of lines that concludes decisively, often with end-stopped punctuation, creating a sense of finality or epigrammatic closure; common in heroic couplets, it delivers a complete thought with rhythmic and semantic self-containment.
Example
Example in poetry:
A couplet with emphatic end-stop: "To err is human; to forgive, divine." (Pope); "And miles to go before I sleep." (Frost); "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." (Shakespeare); "The center cannot hold." (Yeats)
Additional Notes
A Stopped couplet is a couplet (two rhyming lines) where the second line is end-stopped by a strong grammatical punctuation mark (period, colon, semicolon), meaning the sense and the meter conclude together, creating a self-contained unit.
Also Known As
Closed couplet finished couplet stopped dyad End-stopped verse pair
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