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Updated: June 13, 2025
"Even ash, I do thee pluck, Hoping thus to meet good luck; If no good luck I get from thee, I shall wish thee on the tree." And there is the following well-known couplet: "With a four-leaved clover, a double-leaved ash, and a green-topped leave, You may go before the queen's daughter without asking leave."
Before quitting the subject of the sonnet it would, however, be well to mention the changes which were wrought in its structure by early poets desirous of emulating the Italians. Shakspere, as already hinted, adhered to the simple form introduced by Surrey: his stanzas invariably consist of three separate quatrains followed by a couplet.
I composed a little couplet designating my professions as those of Physician, apothecary, chemist, and druggist, Girl about house and boy in the barn. I cared for the horse, cut wood for the fire, searched field and forest for medicinal herbs, ordered other medicines from a druggist in St. John, kept the doctor's accounts, made his pills, and mixed his powders.
"Why, you never seem to have heard of poetical license." "I see," said I, "that I must give up alliteration. Alliteration and rhyme together will, I am afraid, be too much for me. Perhaps the couplet had best stand thus: I long have had a duty hard, I long have been fair Morfydd's bard. "That won't do," said Parkinson. "Why not?" "Because 'tis not English. Bard, indeed!
We once translated this Piron epitaph into a kind of rambling Drayton couplet; and the only point needing explanation is, that, from the accident of scientific men, Fellows of the Royal Society being usually very solemn men, with an extra chance, therefore, for being dull men in conversation, naturally it arose that some wit amongst our great-grandfathers translated F. R. S. into a short-hand expression for a Fellow Remarkably Stupid; to which version of the three letters our English epitaph alludes.
The third couplet is more happy; the value expressed for him, by different sorts of men, raises him to esteem; there is yet something of the common cant of superficial satirists, who suppose that the insincerity of a courtier destroys all his sensations, and that he is equally a dissembler to the living and the dead.
In foreign countries there are many superstitions as to the fitness or unfitness of days, times, and seasons; but in England May appears to be the only month supposed to be unlucky for weddings. The reason for this does not seem clear. The couplet "If married in Lent You are sure to repent,"
He was mightily amused at their simple refrain: "Haul in the bowlin', long-tailed bowlin', Haul in the bowlin' Kitty, O, my darlin'." "That rude couplet," he said, "contains all the original elements of poetry. Firstly, the anthropomorphic element; the sailor imagines his bowline as if it had life. Secondly, the humorous element, for the bowline is all tail.
The dramas were far from being short and dramatic; but the words really were. Nor was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like "the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice," which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be called the worst couplet in the world's literature.
The Englishman, pleased with my reasoning, wrote down the following old couplet, and gave it to me to read: 'Dicite, grammatici, cur mascula nomina cunnus, Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet. After reading it aloud, I exclaimed, "This is Latin indeed." "We know that," said my mother, "but can you explain it?"
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