closed couplet

A rhymed couplet forming a complete thought or syntactic unit, for example, “True wit is nature to advantage dressed,/What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed” (Alexander Pope).

closed couplet, two lines of metrical verse in which the syntax and sense come to a conclusion or a strong pause at the end of the second line, giving the couplet the quality of a self‐contained epigram. The term is applied almost always to rhyming couplets, especially to the heroic couplet; but whereas the heroic couplets of Chaucer and Keats often allow the sense to run on over the end of the second line (see enjambment), those written by English poets in the late 17th century and in the 18th are usually end‐stopped, and are thus closed couplets, as in these lines about men from Sarah Fyge Egerton's ‘The Emulation’ (1703):

They fear we should excel their sluggish parts,
Should we attempt the sciences and arts;
Pretend they were designed for them alone,
So keep us fools to raise their own renown.

A couplet in which the sense and syntax is self-contained within its two lines, as opposed to an open couplet.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a rhymed couplet that forms a complete syntactic unit

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