Practice question · True or false
Terza rima can be interrupted mid-poem without leaving any rhyme unanswered.
Hints
- Each tercet’s middle line sets up the next tercet’s outer rhyme.
- Cutting the chain leaves that middle rhyme with nothing to answer it.
Show the answer
False
Why
False, and this is the form’s structural point. Every middle line commits the poem to a following tercet, so a cut leaves a rhyme hanging. Interpolations become detectable, and the verse acquires a permanent forward lean.
Practise Dante’s Divine Comedy: an Architecture of the Afterlife
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Dante’s Divine Comedy: an Architecture of the Afterlife
- Three canticles of 33 cantos each, plus one introductory canto. How many cantos does the Commedia have in…
- Why does Dante place fraud below violence in hell?
- Dante conceives of damnation as a description rather than a sentence imposed from without. How does this…
- Arrange the regions of Dante’s journey in the order he travels through them.
- Which are consequences of Dante writing in Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin?
- Purgatory is organised around the capital vices, one per terrace. How many terraces does the mountain have?
- The Commedia’s numerical scheme — three canticles of thirty-three cantos, plus one — is deliberate rather…