Ottava Rima

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Giovanni Boccaccio is remembered today almost entirely for the Decameron's prose, but his earlier career as a poet did something the Decameron did not: it gave Italian narrative verse a stanza it would use for the next two centuries. Il Filostrato, composed around 1338, and Teseida, finished around 1341, are both written in ottava rima, eight lines rhyming ABABABCC, and both are long narrative poems rather than the shorter lyric forms the stanza might have stayed confined to. Teseida carries the subtitle delle Nozze d'Emilia, of Emilia's wedding, but the wedding it names is one inside the poem's own plot, not an occasion Boccaccio was marking; his own prose introduction states the poem's real purpose was to court his beloved Fiammetta. Boccaccio did not invent the individual rhyme scheme from nothing, earlier Tuscan religious and courtly verse had already used related eight-line patterns, but he is credited with fixing it specifically as the vehicle for sustained narrative and epic poetry, a choice Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso were still working within a full two hundred years later, in poems Boccaccio never lived to read.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ottava rima's closing couplet, the final CC rhyme after six lines of alternating ABABAB, gives every stanza a small structural landing pad, a place where the verse can pause and comment on itself, and for two centuries of Italian epic that landing pad was mostly used for gravity: a summarizing line, a moral, a moment of pathos. Lord Byron read the same mechanism for exactly the opposite use. In Don Juan, the couplet routinely undercuts whatever elevated claim the stanza's first six lines just made, often with a joke, a bathetic rhyme, or a flat admission that the poem does not take its own high style entirely seriously. The form did not change to make this possible; Byron simply pointed a device built for gravity at comedy instead, proof that a stanza's formal architecture, the placement of its punch, can outlive any single tone its original users happened to fill it with.