The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018
Couplet
Couplet: Two successive lines of rhyming verse, often of the same meter and generally either octosyllabic or decasyllabic.
EXAMPLE: The following stanza from Robert Lowell’s “Waking Early Sunday Morning” (1967) contains four successive couplets:
No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life …