terza rima

   Terza rima is a verse form invented by DANTE for use in his DIVINE COMEDY in the early 14th century. The form consists of a series of tercets (three-line stanzas) rhyming aba bcb cdc ded etc., all in hendecasyllabic, or 11-syllable, lines. That is, the tercets are interconnected in that each succeeding stanza takes the rhyme for its first and third lines from the second line of the previous stanza. Thus

   The Inferno (first part of the Divine Comedy) begins with these nine lines:

   Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

   Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

   Ché la diritta via era smarrita.

   Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

   Esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

   Che nel pensier rinova la paura!

   Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;

   Ma per trattat del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,

   Dirò de l’altre cose ch’i v’ho scorte.

   At the midpoint in the journey of our life

   I found myself astray in a dark wood

   For the straight path had vanished.

   A dread thing it is to tell what it was like,

   This wild wood, rugged, intractable,

   Which, even as I think of it, brings back my fear.

   So bitter it is that scarcely worse is death.

   But, to expound the good which there I met with,

   I will speak of other things I witnessed there.

   (Creagh and Hollander 1989, xviii–xix)

   Such a series of interlinked stanzas could go on indefinitely, until brought to an end by a single line that rhymed with the second line of the immediately preceding tercet. This is the way in which Dante ends each of the cantos of his Comedy. For Dante the terza rima form held significant symbolic meaning. The three-line stanza, of course, reflects the holy Trinity. But it has also been suggested that the potentially endless pattern of the lines evokes a long and arduous journey, as Dante the pilgrim takes through the three realms of the afterlife. Further, the interconnected stanzas might have suggested the interconnectedness of all God’s creation.

   It is possible that Dante found the pattern for the terza rima in tercets used in an earlier kind of satirical poem called the SIRVENTES. But it is Dante who really forged the verse form. Later in the 14th century it was copied by BOCCACCIO in a poem called Amorosa visione, and by PETRARCH in I Trionfi. CHAUCER experimented with its use in one portion of his Complaint to His Lady, but seems to have abandoned it. Ultimately it was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the 16th century, and later used with some success by Milton, Shelley, and T. S. Eliot.

   Bibliography

   ■ Bernardo, Aldo S., and Anthony L. Pellegrini, eds. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1983.

   ■ Boyde, Patrick.Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

   ■ Creagh, Patrick, and Robert Hollander, ed. and trans. Inferno. In Lectura Dantis Americana: Inferno I edited by Anthony K. Cassell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.