Tercet in the 16th century. It was employed by Shelley and is the form used in Byron's "The Prophecy of Dante". Tercet A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem. English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem. A poetic triplet is a tercet in which all three lines follow the same rhyme, AAA; triplets are rather rare; they are more customarily used sparingly in verse of heroic couplets or other couplet verse, to add extraordinary emphasis. Other types of tercet include an enclosed tercet where the lines rhyme in an
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard "Elegy": "I am inclined to believe that the Elegy in a Country Church-yard was begun, if not concluded, at this time [August 1742] also: Though I am aware that as it stands at present, the conclusion is of a later date; how that was originally I shall show in my notes on the poem." Mason's argument was a guess, but he argued that one of Gray's poems from the Eton Manuscript, a copy of Gray's handwritten poems owned by Eton College, was a 22-stanza rough draft of the Elegy called "Stanza's Wrote in a Country Church-Yard". The manuscript copy contained