Tercet 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 ABA pattern and terza rima where the ABA pattern of a verse is continued in the next verse by making
Tercet the villanelle, where the initial five stanzas are tercets, followed by a concluding quatrain. A tercet may also form the separate halves of the ending sestet in a Petrarchan sonnet, where the rhyme scheme is ABBAABBACDCCDC, as in Longfellow's "Cross of Snow". For example, while "Cross of Snow" is indeed a Petrarchan sonnet, it does not follow the form of ABBAABBA CDCCDC. Instead, its form is ABBA CDDC EFG EFG. A tercet also ends sestinas where the keywords of the lines before are repeated in a highly ordered form. The tercet was introduced into English poetry by Sir Thomas Wyatt