How to write a doublet poem

Outside of poems, they are usually seen on the sides of doors leading to people's homes or as hanging scrolls in an interior. Although often called antithetical couplet, they can better be described as a written form of counterpoint.

The most accepted way to break a longer stanza into couplets is through meter and rhyme scheme. For that reason, it's helpful to have a strong grasp of what meter and rhyme scheme are in order to understand how to identify couplets. We provide more details about these terms on their own pages, but offer a quick primer here.

Collection of poems written with stanzas that have three lines. 3 line stanzas are called Tercets. A stanza in poetry is a group of lines usually separated by a blank line. Stanzas of 3 lines are called Tercets from the Latin word tertius meaning three. Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Likewise, in a stanza with a rhyme scheme of ABCABC, it would be odd to refer to the first two lines (AB) as a couplet, rather than to use the ABC tercet as the basic unit of the poem because that is the unit that repeats. The same would be true of a stanza with a more irregular rhyme scheme, such as ABBAB.