Hi
I’m looking for a term for a Sassoon poem(Suicide in the Trenches) aabb rhyme scheme
SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES
https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/suicide.html
I believe it’s called a “simple rhyme scheme”.
I look forward to your feedback.
I think it’s called an heroic couplet.
Sassoon’s verse is octosyllabic, the classic heroic couplet of poets like Dryden and Pope is decasyllabic. I certainly wouldn’t term these heroic couplets although I’m not sure what the correct term would be.
clerihew?
They are rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets. AFAIK there’s no standard term or nickname for that form, although it is commonly associated with doggerel verse, AKA “sub-literary jingling”.
Which presumably is why Sassoon used the form for his poem, as a bitterly ironic contrast between the dark subject matter and the goofy jingling rhymes that the “simple soldier boy” presumably would have liked.
No way. A clerihew (after E. Clerihew Bentley, the form’s best-known popularizer) is a humorous poem usually in two rhyming couples usually with irregular line length and no consistent metrical structure. E.g.:
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.
(Trochaic octameter?)
No, Kimstu had it right in that it’s iambic tetrameter. The feet are generally unstressed followed by stressed (there is variation, but there is almost always variation, as keeping it strictly iambic throughout would be rhythmically boring, or at least lulling. The only poem I can think of off the tope of my head that is iambic tetrameter throughout is Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”) Octameter would be eight feet per line, not syllables.
Thank you all.Very helpful